A Baylor study has found that people who attend churches that teach God’s presence in the workplace and the like have better job satisfaction, higher commitment to their work, and a stronger entrepreneurial spirit. But is this really what the doctrine of vocation is all about?
From Want to Love Your Job? Church Can Help, Study Says | Gleanings | ChristianityToday.com:
Regular attenders who frequent a church that teaches God is present at your workplace, work is a mission from God, or that faith can guide work decisions and practices is a good sign for your career, according to a recent study from Baylor University.
Those who often attend churches with that philosophy are more likely to be committed to their work, be satisfied with their work and look for ways to expand or grow the business.
The effect isn’t huge, but it is statistically significant, said Baylor researcher Jerry Park. . . .
“Being at a church identified as emphasizing faith-work integration was not sufficient to predict job satisfaction,” Park said. “Similarly, just going to church, regardless of what is being taught, has little effect on job satisfaction. However, when one frequently attends a church that emphasizes faith-work integration, job satisfaction increases.”
From the Baylor press release:
The analysis of data — “Workplace-Bridging Religious Capital: Connecting Congregations to Work Outcomes” — is published in the journal Sociology of Religion.
Researchers’ analysis was based on the National Survey of Work, Entrepreneurship and Religion, a 2010 Web-based survey of 1,022 fulltime workers. Their findings concentrated on three areas:
• Job satisfaction: Full-time workers who regularly attend a congregation that emphasizes integrating their faith at work report higher job satisfaction.
• Job commitment: Full-time workers who regularly attend a congregation that emphasizes integrating their faith at work report higher commitment to their place of employment.
• Entrepreneurship: People who are actively involved in in congregations that promote integration of faith with work are more likely to describe themselves as entrepreneurial, Park said. However, attendance seems to impede entrepreneurship — perhaps because time and energy spent in entrepreneurial endeavors leaves less time for church attendance.
How religion affects job satisfaction, commitment to one’s job and entrepreneurship was measured by researchers using a 15-item Congregational Faith at Work Scale, Park said. That scale includes such items as whether respondents sense God’s presence while they work, whether they view their work as having eternal significance, whether they view co-workers as being made in the image of God, whether they believe they should demonstrate “sacrificial love” toward co-workers and whether they believe God wants them to develop their abilities and talents at work.
Workplace attitudes such as job commitment also were evaluated by a variety of items that asked how much participants felt like “part of the family” at their organization, how efficiently they get proposed actions through “bureaucratic red tape” and whether they “went to bat” for good ideas of co-workers.
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