臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.30 NO.3

The Enthusiasm and Exhaustion of Socio-Economic Organization Workers: Based on the Perspective of Job Characteristics 204 2. Methodology 2.1 Stage I We interview 7 SEO workers who involve in different types of organizations, which include SEOs that dedicate to providing employment assistance, to community development, and to sales of services and products. The interviewees range from staff members to managersand executives, and have worked at their organizations at least three years. Our interviews start with questions on work responsibilities, experiences, and events, followed by inquiries regarding the interviewees’ perceptions and feelings toward works (i.e., the meaningfulness of work, passion, stress, emotional exhaustion). Then, we invite three experts who specialize in management, psychology, and social-enterprise respectively to analyze and discuss the results from these interviews. Based on our analysis, we find that due to organizational and legal constraints, it is inevitable that SEO workers consider their organizational contexts and working conditions when performing their work tasks. Therefore, this study focuses on examineing the external job requirements when observing our cases. Theoratically, the JCM only focuses on job requirements, while the job crafting perspective concentrates on the diversity of project tasks. This study takes a more comprehensive view by applying the JCM but further supplementing with the job crafting perspective when collecting and analyzings thedata. We find that the interviewed SEO workers believe that their jobs are meaningful because they have higher senses of job accomplishment, autonomous decision-making powers, and higher relationship values (i.e., providing services and information to socially vulnerable groups). However, they also perceive considerable levels of work stress due to poor working conditions, less potential for career development, less affirmation of their performances, and limited managerial support from their organizations. Thus, the SEO workers indicate that they pay attention to such psychological mechanisms as the positive- enthusiasm perception of meaningfulness of the works, and as the negative-exhaustion perception of work stress, which in turn affect their emotional enthusiasm and exhaustion. Moreover, this study explores five perceived characteristics of SEO jobs that appear to affect employee motivation, namely, skill specialization, task utility, task conduciveness, problem solving, and innovation/flexibility.