Analysis of the influence mechanism of new generation's sense of meaningfulness at work from the perspective of social network-using professional identity as a mediating variable

The new generation of employees has become the living force of most enterprises, and the guarantee of their job stability is of great significance to the development of enterprise organizations. This group of society is also known as the net generation, Internet generation, and second generation, and has more uncertainties and special characteristics based on the rapid development of the Internet. This study takes the new generation of employees as the research target, and constructs a model on the influence mechanism of work meaningfulness from the perspective of social network of new generation employees. The research was conducted by 471 new generation employees in 17 “first-tier cities”, and the relationship between social network, career identity and sense of work meaning was analyzed by using the SEM structure model. The results showed that the social network promoted the sense of work meaning through the mediating effect of career identity, in which the mediating effect of career identity accounted for 21.091% of the total effect value. The study concluded that for the enterprise, the social network of new generation employees were further optimized and cultivated within the enterprises, which will promote the sense of professional identity and also further enhance the sense of job meaning of employees.