Fuqua Insights Podcast: Does Thinking About Legacy Make Work Feel More Meaningful?
Fuqua Insights Podcast: Does Thinking About Legacy Make Work Feel More Meaningful?
Professor Kimberly Wade-Benzoni explains how reflecting on long-term impact shapes motivation, behavior, and decision-making
Many people ask themselves, “does my work actually matter?” Concerns about engagement, burnout, and job satisfaction are common, and they relate to a basic need to feel that work has an impact not only today, but also in the future.
In this episode of Fuqua Insights Podcast, Professor Kimberly Wade-Benzoni of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business discusses her research on the psychology of legacy. She defines legacy as “an enduring impact attached to one’s identity that persists after one has left the context in which the lasting effect was created.” Her research examines how thinking about legacy influences decisions, especially those involving tradeoffs between present and future outcomes.
One of the main findings of Wade-Benzoni’s research is that when people reflect on the legacy they want to leave, their work feels more meaningful. They are also more satisfied in their jobs and more likely to help others. These results come from studies showing that activating legacy motivation can produce positive outcomes in workplace settings.
Legacy reflection changes how people think about their work. As Wade-Benzoni explains, “it’s a way that our actions can have impact that outlasts our individual lives.” This process allows people to think about how part of their identity can continue through others, which helps create meaning and shifts attention from immediate tasks to longer-term goals.
The research also identifies practical applications. A structured reflection exercise—for example, asking individuals to write about how they want to be remembered and the impact they want to have—can activate legacy thinking. This approach can be used in leadership development, career planning, and other organizational contexts. It also encourages people to behave in a more future-oriented and other-oriented way, helping counter short-term, self-focused decision-making, and supporting more meaningful and lasting impact.
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Welcome to Duke Fuqua Insights, a podcast where we explore faculty research and the actionable takeaways for business leaders at every level.
Rashmi Shinde 00:00:17
If you've ever asked yourself, ‘does my work actually matter?’ you're not alone. Engagement, burnout, and job satisfaction are the top concerns for managers and employees alike, and they all die back to a basic human need to feel that our work makes an impact not just today, but weeks, months, and years down the line.
I'm Rashmi Shinde, a current MBA student at Fuqua, and today I'm joined by Professor Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, a leading scholar on the topic of legacy. Her research looks at how people think about the impact they'll have after they're gone, and how those thoughts influence everything from ethics to leadership.
In a recent series of studies, she finds that when people reflect on their long-term impact, their work feels more meaningful. They are more satisfied in their jobs, and they're even more likely to help others. We'll explore why legacy is such a powerful idea at work and what leaders can take from it. Professor, thanks for joining me.
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:01:29
Thank you for this opportunity to share my work.
Rashmi Shinde 00:01:32
Diving right into it. The word legacy carries a lot of weight and people may define it differently to start. How do you define legacy and what made you want to study it?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:01:46
Legacies are typically understood as something we leave behind when we die. How we leave our mark on the world, or how we contribute in a personal way to the future. My coauthors and I define legacy as an enduring impact attached to one's identity that persists after one has left the context in which the lasting effect was created.
Legacies can involve leaving tangible benefits such as money or resources, but can also involve intangible things such as values or ideas. The project we're talking about today is part of a larger research program on the psychology of legacies that encompasses many papers, coauthors, and dozens of studies.
Our focus on the concept of legacy originally came from our interest in understanding what motivates people in today's world to act in ways that help future generations, even when it may require sacrifices from themselves in the present. In a common finding across many of our studies and research projects, is that the motivation to leave a legacy is a key factor in prompting this kind of behavior.
So given the central role of legacy motivation in understanding intergenerational tradeoffs, we sought to better understand how legacy motivation can affect people and their decisions.
Rashmi Shinde 00:03:18
That offers a really clear and thoughtful foundation for how to think about legacy in this context. With that perspective in mind, in this research, you focus on the motivational side of legacy in the context of everyday work and organizations. What were the biggest questions you were trying to answer?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:03:39
The set of studies that we're talking about today was conducted in collaboration with my coauthor, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, who is a graduate from the Fuqua doctoral program. We know from previous research that people often view their work as having a central place in finding a meaningful life. Yet the question of how to foster meaning in organizational settings remains a challenge for practitioners.
With this research project, we sought to explore the question of how activating legacy motivations can be a way to create more meaning at work, as well as positive outcomes for those striving to leave a legacy.
Rashmi Shinde 00:04:22
I really appreciate how you've approached this from a motivational lens within everyday work settings. One of your central findings is that when people reflect on the legacy they want to leave, their work feels more meaningful. What's happening for people when that shift occurs?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:04:40
When people leave a legacy, it enables them to carry forward a piece of their identity into the future, and that allows them to extend their impact beyond their tenure in an organization and even beyond the constraints of their mortal lives. So there's actually something deeply existential that occurs with that shift at the crux of the motivation to leave a legacy is the desire to overcome the ultimately limited nature of our human existence.
The fact that we will eventually be out of the picture can cause a lot of anxiety for people, since it challenges our sense of self-importance. Leaving a legacy can help us to address this challenge by offering some symbolic immortality. It's a way that our actions can have impact that outlasts our individual lives.
Thinking about their legacy enables people to envision how part of their identity can live on through the lives of others. It's through this connection between themselves and future others that meaning can be created. People are not always thinking about how their work contributes to future generations, but our research suggests that by helping people to connect their daily actions with a lasting impact on others, it can create more meaning at work.
Rashmi Shinde 00:06:10
That's a powerful shift, especially in how it connects internal reflection with a sense of meaning. If that's what's happening for people internally, are there practical ways leaders can encourage this kind of legacy thinking and work without it feeling forced or overly abstract?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:06:29
In our research, we developed a simple, structured reflection task that can be easily implemented in organizations and is very effective at activating legacy motivations and helping people to connect their daily activities with bigger picture outcomes. We ask people to think about the impact they want to have on future generations, and then to write about it for a few minutes, reflecting on how they would like to be remembered by future generations, what they would like to leave behind, and how they would like their actions, decisions, and behavior to affect future generations in a lasting way, and specifically how they would like to contribute to their organizations and how their work makes the world a better place.
Our approach offers a practical and simple tool to activate legacy motivation that can be introduced at any point in adult life and in virtually any context, making it broadly accessible. Legacy. Reflection is most effective when introduced in contexts that promote long term thinking, and when embedded in environments that emphasize personal growth, goal setting, or social contributions.
Since these settings provide both the motivation and structure needed for meaningful and effective reflection, it fits naturally into contexts such as career development, life transitions, leadership training, or educational programs. This approach can be applied to individuals at all levels of influence in organizations and society.
Rashmi Shinde 00:08:09
Those insights feel both intuitive and very actionable for leaders thinking about their teams taking a wider view. Many organizations are grappling with the big shifts right now, including AI and rapid technological change. How does your research on legacy help us think differently about work when roles and tasks are constantly evolving?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:08:36
We care deeply about our legacies, but we're not usually thinking about them. As we go through our busy day to day routines, we rarely stop to contemplate what kind of impact we want to leave for future generations, and legacy motivation remains dormant as we focus on daily tasks, but legacy reflection helps people to connect their daily activities to bigger picture outcomes.
So instead of focusing on the specific tasks at hand, it helps people to think more in terms of their overall impact. It helps people to think about their goals more holistically and with longer time horizons. And with that perspective, it's easier to see how the specific tasks and roles fit into the bigger picture, and individual tasks become less important as the focus shifts to higher level goals.
Rashmi Shinde 00:09:37
That perspective feels especially relevant given how quickly the nature of work is changing right now. Connecting this to the Fuqua environment at Fuqua, a lot of students talk about purpose driven work or using business as a force for good. How does thinking about legacy add something different or maybe more personal to those conversations?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:10:03
Legacy is meaningful because we're leaving a piece of ourselves behind, and the idea is for the effect to be long lasting impact that is fleeting or inconsequential would not be a legacy. The enduring nature of legacies is precisely what distinguishes legacy motives from other short term, short lived types of impacts that 1st May desire to have legacy as a temporal component, and that's what sets forth the foundation for individuals to be able to achieve self extension through time and to overcome their mortality in a symbolic way.
Rashmi Shinde 00:10:45
I really like how that brings a more personal and reflective layer into conversations around purpose. Following that thread, you've also written about ethics and long-term decision making. Does legacy thinking change how people approach ethical choices at work, especially when short term incentives are pulling in the opposite direction?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:11:09
People care about their legacy, and most people want it to be positive. It's a lot harder to build a positive legacy by only acting for your own self-interest. Our legacy reflection exercise doesn't tell people what their legacy should be, what it should look like, or who should benefit from it. We just give people the space to think about how they want to be remembered by others, and to act on those thoughts.
And what we find is that when they have the opportunity to reflect on their lasting impact, one that extends beyond their physical existence, their decisions and behaviors shift in a way that is more other oriented and future oriented. It consistently helps to counteract the tendency for short term and self-focused behaviors.
Rashmi Shinde 00:12:03
That adds a really nuanced way of thinking about long term choices and responsibility at work. Finally, when you think about the future of work more broadly, What do you hope leaders take away from this research?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni 00:12:18
Thinking about their legacy isn't something that people do automatically. They generally don't start to think about their legacies until they're near the end of their careers and lives. At that point, they try to construct narratives of what gives their lives meaning, and they come to understand their legacy by looking back at what they've already done with their lives.
But if we wait until the end to think about our legacies, we often lack the time we need to craft the impact we truly want. In our research, we suggest bringing legacy reflection to an earlier place in our careers and lives by being more intentional about it, thinking about the lasting impact you want to create, and how your current actions align with that vision.
Being more intentional about it increases the likelihood of leaving a more meaningful, lasting impact. The best way to leave the legacy you want is to think about it and take appropriate steps to enact it. Our research shows that this process leads to behaviors and decisions that improve people's well-being, largely through enabling them to understand what makes their lives and work meaningful.
Rashmi Shinde 00:13:38
That's a really inspiring way to think about the future of work, and especially the kind of impact leaders can have over time. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and for such a thoughtful conversation. It's given us a lot to reflect on, both as individuals and as future leaders. I really appreciate your time, professor.
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni
Thank you.
Rashmi Shinde
Duke Fuqua Insights is produced by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. You can learn more at www.fuqua.duke.edu/podcast
Bio
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni is a professor of Management & Organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where she is also a scholar at the Center of Leadership and Ethics (COLE). Professor Wade-Benzoni is an internationally recognized researcher in the area of intergenerational decision making and she has received numerous competitive awards from organizations such as the International Association for Conflict Management, State Farm Companies Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation.
Her research on intergenerational decisions, ethics, and environmental issues has been published in leading management and psychology journals including the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Psychological Science, Research in Organizational Behavior, and others. She is co-editor of the book, Environment, Ethics, and Behavior: The Psychology of Environmental Valuation and Degradation and co-editor of a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on environmental issues. She has held a variety of leadership positions including serving on the Duke University Academic Council, the executive committee for the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management, and editorial boards of leading management journals including the Academy of Management Review and the Academy of Management Journal.
Her teaching expertise includes a variety of management core and elective courses including Navigating Organizations, Negotiations, and Power & Influence. Prior to joining Fuqua, she served on the faculties at the Stern School of Business at New York University and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she won a teaching award for her negotiations course. Professor Wade-Benzoni received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. Prior to her academic career, she worked for Verizon in a variety of positions including systems engineering, market research, corporate education & training, and corporate sales.
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