Amy Wrzesniewski

Amy Wrzesniewski is an American organizational psychologist whose research examines how people make meaning of their work. She earned her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, where she worked with Jane Dutton.1 She taught at New York University's Stern School of Business before joining the Yale School of Management in 2006, where she was named the Michael H. Jordan Professor of Management in 2018. She later moved to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Wrzesniewski's most influential finding is the distinction between people who experience their work as a job, a career, or a calling.2 In studies of hospital cleaning staff, she found that workers in the same role, with the same pay and the same tasks, described their work in fundamentally different terms. Those who saw their work as a calling reported redesigning their own jobs to include activities not in their formal descriptions, such as rearranging artwork for comatose patients or timing their cleaning to reduce disruption for families.

Wrzesniewski and Dutton formalized this behavior as "job crafting," the process by which employees redraw the task, relational, and cognitive boundaries of their jobs to change both their work identity and its meaning.3 The concept challenged the assumption that job design flows exclusively from management to worker. In Wrzesniewski's framework, employees are active architects of their own experience, reshaping roles from the inside.

A later collaboration with Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore College examined West Point cadets and found that those who entered the military academy with both internal and instrumental motivations performed worse over time than those driven primarily by internal motivations alone.4 The research suggested that adding external incentives to intrinsically motivated activity can undermine rather than reinforce commitment.