Charlotte Rodriguez Conde reached top place for her study into existential concerns relating to work, with which she completed her master’s of Work and Organisational Psychology (FPN) last year. It is a thesis with a philosophical slant and a wide-ranging topic: how people give meaning to their lives. “That is something that has always fascinated me,” says Rodriguez Conde. She focussed on the role of jobs in this process. “In Western culture, people are increasingly looking for the value or meaning of the jobs they have. That can be a positive thing, but it can also produce a great deal of pressure or disappointment. Little is known about the effects of this on mental health.”
As there was no method yet to measure this, she developed and tested one herself. Using questions about such themes as death (Do I not waste too much of my limited time on work?) and identity (Do I manage to express myself well enough in my job?), this scale measures the existential concerns of the respondents. “We can use the answers to find out how such concerns affect for example the emergence of burnouts or the performance of workers. I already investigated the former in my thesis, and we found evidence that there is indeed a link. That is fairly new: normally, the focus in studies is primarily on exhaustion caused by work overload, but we now see that things like a lack of meaning in work – which may lead to a lack of motivation or apathy - also play a role in the case of burnouts.”
Winning the thesis prize came as a surprise for Rodriguez Conde, who is currently doing a PhD at KU Leuven and UCLouvain. “Perhaps it helped that people have become more aware of existential concerns during the Covid pandemic. Many people working from home spent every day sitting in front of their computer screens and sometimes wondered: ‘Why am I actually doing this?’”
Better focus
The thesis written by Dieuwertje van Dijk, who came third, also gained extra relevance because of the pandemic. During her master’s of Learning and Development in Organisations (SBE), she investigated the stress that managers experience during a crisis. “They sometimes have to deal with very high levels of stress for prolonged periods, but they seem to be able to cope well,” says Van Dijk. To find out why this is the case, she interviewed leaders in organisations such as the police force and a Covid ward in a hospital.
“What struck me was the positive way in which they looked at stress. They didn’t regard it as something unhealthy, but rather as something that made them perform better, gave them a better focus. That is in line with the theory that says that if you believe that stress has a positive effect on you, your body actually does respond differently to it.” Meanwhile, the research results are already being applied by OTO Limburg to develop a masterclass about stress for crisis managers.
The jury praised Van Dijk for her elaborate approach, in which she collected a huge amount of data. Of course, that also meant that there was lots of data to analyse. Was that not stressful? “It was indeed a tense period and I spent a great deal of time on it. But the interviews were valuable for me personally too. I received a lot of tips from the crisis managers, for example that you should also enjoy the things you do.”
DIY camper van
Partially because of those tips, she also knows what she will spend the thousand-euro prize money on: it will go to the camper van that she and her boyfriend are building. “We want to use it to go travelling for a while.” Rodriguez Conde also has an idea what she wants to do with the two thousand euro that she received for her first place: go on a alpinism course. That idea – just like her thesis – has a philosophical slant too. “When you climb one of these enormous mountains, you realise that you are in fact only a small creature in this big world.”