Automation is increasingly reorganizing not only what employees do but also how they understand who they are, why their work matters, what they remain capable of doing, and where responsibility resides. Prevailing accounts often emphasize productivity, employment displacement, or technological adoption while treating meaningful work as a secondary outcome. This narrative review examines how automation may reshape meaningful work through four connected domains: identity continuity and disruption, purpose under task substitution, skill displacement and competence loss, and moral agency in automated systems. A structured narrative-review approach was used to identify, screen, critically read, and thematically synthesize relevant peer-reviewed scholarship. The evidence suggests that automation is neither intrinsically meaning-destroying nor meaning-enhancing. Its consequences depend on which tasks are removed or retained, whether valued contribution remains visible, whether workers can reconstruct role identities, whether opportunities for learning and competent performance are preserved, and whether human judgement remains substantively contestable and accountable. Evidence converges on the importance of work design and implementation configuration but remains heterogeneous across occupations, technologies, methods, and levels of analysis. Much of the available evidence is conceptual, qualitative, cross-sectional, or context specific, limiting causal inference and generalizability. The review contributes an integrative basis for later developing an Identity–Purpose–Competence–Agency redesign cycle, explicitly presented as an original synthesis rather than a validated model. Organizational implications therefore concern questions for design, participation, and monitoring, not universal prescriptions or implementation-ready rules.
