What Happens When a Calling Becomes Unsustainable?

What happens when people leave work they once considered a calling? Research has largely assumed that they won’t: When people see a profession as central to who they are, they usually find ways to reshape their lives around it so they can stay.

But what happens when the effort to remain in meaningful work becomes its own source of harm?

In this Q&A, Shannon Sciarappa, a new assistant professor of organizational behavior at Rice Business, discusses her research on what happens when people recognize that a beloved profession has become unsustainable and how they can construct a meaningful life beyond it.

First, welcome to Rice. How has your experience been so far?

Thanks so much. One thing I noticed about Rice right away is that there are resources everywhere, and people are genuinely happy to help you succeed. I’m grateful for the opportunity to join such an impressive, supportive community. I’m very happy to be here.

How would you describe your research?

I’m on the more micro side of organizational behavior, interested in the experiences of individuals at work. Most of my work is qualitative, and I draw from research on identity and meaningful work. I may be a glutton for punishment, but I’m especially interested in what happens when things go wrong: when the way you work changes, or when the future you expected from your work no longer seems possible. How do people grapple with that disruption? How do they recalibrate and move forward?

The idea of having a “calling” is especially interesting to me because it’s more than enjoying your job or feeling intrinsically motivated. It is a highly meaningful view of work, one that is closely tied to identity and often carries moral and social significance. The work feels integral to who you are. That makes it powerful. But it also makes disruption much harder to absorb.

How did you become interested in this area of study?

While I was at Boston College, teachers in nearby Newton went on strike. I read a news story that quoted a former teacher who had returned to support her former colleagues. She said the profession was supposed to be a calling, something you did because you loved the kids. It was hard to say, “I love the kids, but I want to leave.”

That stayed with me. I had been studying meaningful work, so I started looking for research on people who leave callings and found very little. Most studies tell us that a calling is sticky. People are more likely to craft their jobs and their lives around maintaining it than to walk away. But people can and do leave. I wanted to understand what finally makes that possible, and what leaving means for them afterward.

Is this dynamic specific to teaching?

Education makes the tension especially visible, but I would expect similar dynamics in other helping professions, including healthcare and animal care. But, in theory, it could exist anywhere we find passionate workers. The common ingredient is the combination of a strong source of meaningfulness, deep identification with the work, and conditions that can exploit that identification. 

If leaders want work to remain sustainably meaningful, they have to provide the resources that allow people to continue doing it. Money is one resource, but so are time, recovery and support for mental health. 

What pushes people to leave work they feel so strongly about?

I expected to find a particular force pushing people out or pulling them toward something else. Instead, I found a tension that built over time. The former teachers I interviewed talked about an almost magical draw toward teaching. It was what they were supposed to do and who they were supposed to be. At the same time, they described significant suffering.

Because people with callings work so hard to stay, they often begin by altering themselves to fit the profession. They absorb more, lower their expectations or keep trying to repair the relationship. Over time, that effort can damage their mental and physical health. The final breaking point is often not one dramatic event. It’s the realization that the calling had become unsustainable. My research participants would look toward the future they once imagined, including retirement, and ask: Can I keep doing this for that long? Eventually, the answer was no.

It must be emotionally very difficult to leave one’s calling. What does it feel like to people who go through that?

It’s not a clean process. There’s grief and sadness because people are losing work they loved, but there’s also guilt and shame. Many of my research participants entered teaching because they cared deeply about students and education. Leaving can feel like abandoning those commitments, especially when people around them don’t understand what they’ve lived through.

At the same time, many begin to acknowledge the injustices they experienced. They recognize that a profession that was supposed to work for them did not, and that callings can sometimes be unhealthy or exploitative. Recovery requires them to reconsider what work could or should be. They begin to create distance from the job as their primary source of identity and meaning, then invest in family, hobbies or other parts of themselves. Once they feel the benefits of this recovery, some later miss the meaningfulness and seek it again, but with a clearer sense of boundaries.

Managers shouldn’t interpret continued dedication as evidence that the conditions are working. People with callings may tolerate poor conditions longer precisely because the work matters so much to them.

What can people do when a calling has maybe become too large a part of who they are?

The people in my study who seemed healthiest approached work as one part of a loosely coupled system, drawing from the work of late organizational theorist Karl Weick. In this case, their work, identity, and sense of meaning were connected, but not so tightly that losing one caused the entire system to collapse. They had built a more complex system wherein other identities, relationships, and sources of meaning could support them through a disruption.

One former teacher described changing how he thought about himself. Instead of saying, “I am a teacher,” he began to say, “I am someone who teaches.” That small shift opened other possibilities. He could teach in different settings or in different ways. The calling did not disappear, but it became part of him rather than the whole of him. That leaves more room to change, and more room to stay well.

How can managers recognize that meaningful work is becoming unsustainable before someone leaves?

One signal is that the employee keeps changing themselves to accommodate the job. They absorb more, lower their expectations and treat deteriorating mental or physical health as something they have to manage privately. Another is that they can no longer imagine doing the work over the long term. We often hear this talked about in terms of burnout.

Managers shouldn’t interpret continued dedication as evidence that the conditions are working. People with callings may tolerate poor conditions longer precisely because the work matters so much to them. By the time they leave, the tension may have been building for years.

We all want a passionate workforce, but not at the expense of workers’ health. That dedication only lasts so long. Sustainable passion is something worthy of investment.

What else can managers learn from the experiences of people who leave a calling?

Passion is not an infinite resource. Organizations want dedicated employees, but they can’t treat dedication as a substitute for support. If leaders want work to remain sustainably meaningful, they have to provide the resources that allow people to continue doing it. Money is one resource, but so are time, recovery and support for mental health. 

If possible, leaders should consider offering sabbaticals or other opportunities for genuine recovery. Anything leaders can do to encourage employees to invest in other identities or sources of meaningfulness (that is, create a more complex system) would be beneficial for the health of their workforce, and for retaining dedicated employees. 

Research on “decent work” identifies five essential elements: safe working conditions, time for rest, values that complement a person’s family and social values, adequate compensation and access to healthcare. Those basics may matter even more in professions where people feel called to the work, because passion can motivate people to tolerate their absence for a while. 

The idea that organizations can exploit passionate employees because those employees will remain dedicated is not a reality leaders should count on, if it ever was. We all want a passionate workforce, but not at the expense of workers’ health. That dedication only lasts so long. Sustainable passion is something worthy of investment.