Despite the various positive outcomes of perceived calling fulfillment at work that previous scholars have suggested, little effort has been made to understand employees who have a calling but do not identify it with their current work. By integrating self-determination theory into the calling literature, we explore how having a calling outside of one’s workplace can still lead individuals to connect strongly with their work through a mechanism that we term perceived calling enablement. Through an initial qualitative study, we identify four ways through which employees perceive their work as a calling enabler: as a source of (1) financial resources, (2) time flexibility, (3) skill development and learning, and (4) social networks/connections that allow people to pursue their callings. Then, in a series of quantitative survey studies, we developed a measure of perceived calling enablement that reflects these four dimensions and showed that perceived calling enablement facilitated work attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, willingness to sacrifice, and job crafting.

尽管先前的学者已经提出了在工作中感知使命感的各种积极成果，但很少有人努力去理解那些有使命感但不认同其当前工作的员工。通过将自我决定理论融入到召唤文献中，我们探索了在工作场所之外拥有召唤如何仍然可以通过我们称之为“感知召唤支持”的机制引导个人与他们的工作建立牢固的联系。通过初步定性研究，我们确定了员工将其工作视为召唤推动者的四种方式：作为 (1) 财务资源、(2) 时间灵活性、(3) 技能发展和学习以及 (4) 社交的来源允许人们追求自己使命的网络/连接。然后，在一系列定量调查研究中，我们开发了一种反映这四个维度的感知职业支持的衡量标准，并表明感知职业支持促进了工作态度和行为，例如工作满意度、牺牲意愿和工作塑造。