Gavin R. Slemp
Paid employment is viewed and is indeed experienced in a variety of ways (Gini, 1998). For some people, it is a curse to which they are condemned, a burden imposed on them, an unfortunate obligation that takes their time away from the things that really matter in life. Perhaps not surprisingly, evidence suggests that for many the thought of going to work is accompanied by chronic stress and worrying (Scholtz, Hellhammer, Schulz, & Stone, 2004), an indication that for these people their jobs are unlikely to generate feelings of gleeful anticipation. Yet, evidence also suggests that for some people the opposite experience reflects their reality of work (Wrzesniewski, 2003; Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997). These people do not typically experience the pain, the drudgery, or the daily “grind” of work. Instead, they see it is a source of joy, something to look forward to because it provides a context to pursue and achieve goals, learn new skills, experience challenge, efficacy, and contribution, and to develop relationships with others. For these people, working often forms a central feature in their concept of self, and helps shape their understanding of who they are and why their lives matter. And for many others still, their experience of work lies between these two polar realities.
Irrespective of one’s subjective quality of work experiences, working is typically a non‐negotiable reality of adult living and research shows that paid employment has significant implications for adult psychological and physical health (Linn, Sandifer, & Stein, 1985; Repetti, Matthews, & Waldron, 1989; Steger & Dik, 2010). Despite working often being a significant source of worry and stress (Scholtz et al., 2004), one only has to examine the relationship between unemployment and ill health to understand the significance that work has in healthy living (see Jin, Shah, & Svoboda, 1995; Murphey & Athanasou, 1999). Further, research shows that even though humans are innately resilient and tend to positively adapt to negative or painful circumstances in life (e.g., Brickman, Coates, & Janoff‐Bulman, 1978; Frederick & Lowenstein, 1999), a sustained period of unemployment is one of the few life circumstances to which humans have difficulty adapting and from which they often fail to return to their baseline psychological state (Clark, Diener, Georgellis, & Lucas, 2008; Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2004). Hence, working and employment matter for a healthy adult life.
Once employed, the nature of the job has further implications for mental health and well‐being (O’Brien & Feather, 1990). Accordingly, the last three decades have seen substantial scholarly inquiry into the employees’ experience of work and what makes work enjoyable, meaningful, and engaging. While much of this research was guided by the theoretical assumption that employees are passive recipients of their work tasks and contexts (Fried & Ferris, 1987; Hackman & Oldham, 1976, 1980; Loher, Noe, Moeller, & Fitzgerald, 1985), more recently the perspective has shifted from the design of jobs to the job incumbents, suggesting that they take a more active role in shaping their tasks, their environment, and their overall experience of work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001; Wrzesniewski, LoBuglio, Dutton, & Berg, 2013).
One of these more recent theoretical perspectives is job crafting, which is defined as “the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work” (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001, p. 179). Rather than making formal changes to position descriptions and the structural characteristics of jobs, job crafting is an agentic and informal process whereby employees take initiative to shift and push the task and relational boundaries of their jobs, potentially introducing a new understanding of what may be considered the entity of work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).
It is the aim of this chapter to explore the concept of job crafting and to review the theoretical underpinnings about how it predicts relevant outcomes in the workplace, such as well‐being, engagement, and mental health – focusing on self‐determination theory (SDT) and the job demands‐resources (JD‐R) model. This chapter will also explore how the application of job crafting can potentially create greater coherence between the individual and the working environment, such that employees might create better alignment between their natural preferences and dispositions and the broader contexts in which they work. It will finish with some suggestions for future research.
Job crafting fits within the literature on employee proactivity, which suggests that employees do not just let their work happen to them, but instead they have an active role in shaping the nature of their work (Grant & Ashford, 2008). Some job redesign concepts that are related to job crafting, though conceptually distinct, are those such as expressing voice (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998), task revision (Staw & Boettger, 1990), role innovation (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979), or making idiosyncratic deals (Rousseau, 2005; see Tims & Bakker, 2010 for a description and review). While these concepts are about the proactive changes employees make to aid the redesign of their work roles, they are distinct from job crafting in that they are generally focused on resolving organizational problems and improving organizational effectiveness. Hence they do not necessarily contribute to a higher‐quality work experience for employees, which some scholars have argued is a central feature of job crafting (e.g., Tims & Bakker, 2010). Job crafting also differs from concepts such as job enlargement and job enrichment (Parker, 1998), which are mediums through which the amount of work or the nature of work, respectively, are generally altered in a top‐down way from management in order to enhance the quality of the work experience for employees. Hence, employee proactivity does not necessarily form a central feature of this type of job redesign.
Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s (2001) original theoretical position on job crafting was that employees can proactively craft their jobs in three distinct ways, which they referred to as task, relational, and cognitive crafting. Task crafting involves shifting the “physical or temporal” qualities (Wrzesniewski et al., 2013, p. 283) that make up the job. Employees might add new tasks to (or remove tasks from) the job such that the physical nature of the work is changed. Similarly, employees might invest their time and effort more exclusively on a particular part of their job, such that the overall nature of the job is altered. Opting for additional challenge or complexity in one’s role, placing an emphasis on those tasks that are more enjoyable, adding or reducing one’s responsibility for different tasks, or perhaps embracing new tasks that do not naturally form part of one’s work role are just some of the activities that have been suggested that might constitute task crafting. Relational crafting involves initiating changes to the social features of working and pushing the schematic relational boundaries of the job (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001; Wrzesniewski et al., 2013). It might involve creating new relationships, limiting or ending toxic interactions or relationships, or taking steps to cultivate and strengthen positive relationships at work – all possible actions that alter the way in which the job is experienced. Further, employees might even just think about their work connections in a new way, potentially developing a greater sense of meaning and appreciation for the role that other people have in their work life (Wrzesniewski et al., 2013). Finally, cognitive crafting refers to shifting the cognitive boundaries that attribute meaning or significance to the tasks or relationships within the job. This can involve altering how one thinks about the job, such as by viewing it as a set of discrete tasks or as an integrated whole (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), or it can also involve ascribing purpose or significance to the work itself (Wrzesniewski et al., 2013). Cognitive crafting is the facet of job crafting that most closely aligns with work identity, which can be broadly characterized as a work‐based “self‐definition” that facilitates an understanding of the actions needed to be performed within a given occupation and the corresponding ways to effectively perform those actions (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). It also includes a stable idea of who one is at work, including both the personal attributes (e.g., assertiveness, ambition) and the social identities (e.g., male/female, manager) one holds (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Walsh & Gordon, 2008). Through shaping the cognitions employees have about work, they are able to shift the meaning and significance they derive from their work experiences and potentially create a more positive or self‐congruent work identity.
The three types of job crafting can overlap and it is quite plausible that one form of activity or agency in an organization might encompass multiple types of job crafting, potentially all three (see Wrzesniewski, Berg, & Dutton, 2010; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001; Wrzesniewski et al., 2013 for a deeper discussion about the three components of job crafting with several examples). The temporal span of job crafting is also not fixed, but instead it can occur quickly, whereby employees craft their more immediate, day‐to‐day work experiences; it might also develop over longer periods of time (Wrzesniewski et al., 2013) and potentially be integrated into goal setting and other longer‐term development planning.
Much of the theorizing on job crafting has placed the emphasis on individual agency and has thus focused on the individual level of analysis (to be explored shortly). However, there is also some evidence that job crafting occurs among workgroups who collectively modify how their work is to be organized and enacted. In one of the early empirical studies Leana, Appelbaum, and Shevchuck (2009) extended job crafting theory to incorporate both individual and “collaborative” job crafting – the latter described as team‐members jointly determining how to modify their work to meet shared objectives. Using modified scales to capture the collaborative aspect of job crafting in a sample of 232 teachers and teaching aides, these authors found that individual and collaborative crafting are empirically distinct constructs. Further, collaborative crafting positively related with job performance, particularly for the less experienced teachers. The authors concluded that both collaborative and individual job crafting are distinct and important constructs that could be incorporated into future research.
The following section will explore the research findings on job crafting in more detail by exploring the possible consequences of job crafting and how it potentially benefits employees. This discussion will include a review of two theoretical models through which job crafting might create these valued outcomes in employees.
SDT (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000a) is a metatheory of human motivation that posits that humans hold an innate drive to behave in self‐directed, intrinsically motivated ways. It suggests that people are active, growth‐oriented beings who seek a synthesis with their environment and to integrate themselves into larger social systems (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Through this process of integration, individuals pursue challenge and opportunities to use their natural talents and dispositions, thus acting in accordance with their internally driven, “true” selves (Ryan & Deci, 2002). Self‐actualization, vitality, and integrity tend to occur when individuals successfully integrate and behave in accordance with their true selves, thus allowing for intrinsically motivated, self‐determined, pursuits and behaviors (Deci & Ryan, 2008a, 2008b).
One subtheory of SDT – based on decades of research on intrinsic motivation and well‐being (Deci & Ryan, 2008b) – suggests that humans contain a set of universal psychological needs that must be satisfied in order to attain optimal functioning and psychological health. These are the needs to feel autonomous, competent, and related to others. Autonomy requires a sense of volition and the perception that one’s behavior is self‐directed (Deci, 1975; Deci & Ryan, 1995). Competence requires feelings of mastery, attaining desired outcomes, and succeeding at challenging tasks (Deci & Ryan, 1980). Relatedness requires an ability to develop meaningful relationships with others and a sense of mutual respect and reliance with others (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). SDT defines the three needs as fundamental nutriments for human functioning, growth, and integrity. Accordingly, research has largely supported the importance of need satisfaction for psychological health and vitality, as well as vice versa – thwarting need satisfaction is related to various indices of ill‐being (see Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000b; Vansteenkiste & Ryan, 2013).
The needs have also been explored within several different contexts, such as sport (e.g., Gagné, Ryan, & Bargmann, 2003; Reinboth & Duda, 2006; Reinboth, Duda, & Ntoumanis, 2004; Wilson, Rodgers, Blanchard, & Gessell, 2003), everyday life (e.g., Reis, Sheldon, Gable, Roscoe, & Ryan, 2000; Sheldon, Ryan, & Reis, 1996), and, importantly, at work. This latter body of research has generally shown that need satisfaction at work predicts enhanced work‐related outcomes, such as motivation, engagement, well‐being, and performance. Baard, Deci, and Ryan (2004), for example, investigated intrinsic need satisfaction as a motivational basis for performance and well‐being in two different organizations. They showed that those employees who were generally higher in need satisfaction received higher performance evaluations and were higher in psychological adjustment. Graves and Luciano (2013) supported these results and showed that psychological need satisfaction predicts autonomous motivation at work, which in turn predicts higher vitality, job satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment. Deci et al. (2001) found similar results but also included different cultures in the analysis. Specifically, they found support for a “self‐determination model” in both U.S. and Bulgarian participants, whereby need satisfaction predicted enhanced engagement and self‐esteem, as well as lower anxiety. Further research with European samples shows consistent patterns with Deci et al. (2001) (e.g., Van den Broeck, Vansteenkiste, De Witte, & Lens, 2008), showing that need satisfaction predicts low levels of exhaustion as well as enhanced vigor. Overall, research has largely supported these findings, suggesting that intrinsic need satisfaction is an important potential antecedent to workplace well‐being (see Gagné & Deci, 2005; Van den Broeck, Vansteenkiste, & De Witte, 2008).
Job crafting presents opportunities for employees to integrate and meaningfully organize their experience of work into an authentic sense of self. By crafting their jobs, employees can better align their work experiences with their internally driven, true sense of self, potentially fostering and enabling more intrinsically motivated behaviors. In line with this view, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) suggested that the impetus to engage in job crafting (though task, relational, or cognitive forms of crafting) arises from three important human motivations. First, humans are motivated to maintain control over their environment (see Bandura, 1989; Leotti, Lyengar, & Ochsner, 2010) and job crafting helps employees to attain a greater sense of control over their jobs and hence to avoid alienation from their work. Second, humans are driven to create a positive self‐image in their own eyes (see Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, 2004) and job crafting aids the striving toward self‐enhancement through the creation of a more positive work identity. Finally, humans are driven by the need to belong and feel interpersonal connection (see Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and job crafting provides a way for employees to forge and foster connections with others.
While Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) did not explicitly link these three motivations with SDT, their conceptual similarity with the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, respectively, is quite evident (Slemp & Vella‐Brodrick, 2014). Hence, employees are perhaps motivated to craft their work experiences toward need‐satisfying activities, which potentially allows for the better utilization of natural talents, dispositions, and work preferences. This process, in turn, likely enables progress toward more advanced integration and synthesis with the working environment and thus allows for the application of self‐determined behaviors and pursuits. The pursuit of need‐satisfying experiences at work should also have corresponding influences on employee functioning and well‐being. This theoretical model was recently explored by Slemp and Vella‐Brodrick (2014) in a sample of 253 working adults. Using structural equation modeling, their results showed that, as hypothesized, job crafting predicted intrinsic need satisfaction at work, which in turn predicted hedonic (e.g., pleasure, satisfaction) and eudaimonic (e.g., growth, mastery, fulfillment, etc.) well‐being – measured with the Mental Health Continuum, Short Form (MHCSF; Keyes et al., 2008). Although this finding needs to be replicated with longitudinal or experimental data where the temporal ordering of the variables can be established more clearly, this study is consistent with the notion that job crafting is a potential mechanism through which employees satisfy their fundamental psychological needs at work, which enhances their experience of work, including their well‐being.
This study is also consistent with research showing that job crafting potentially contributes to employee perceptions of person–job fit, typically defined as the perceived compatibility between the individual and their job characteristics (Kristof‐Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005). Lu, Wang, Lu, Du, and Bakker (2014), for example, explored the relation between job crafting and person–job fit in a two‐wave longitudinal study of 246 Chinese employees in a technology firm. Specifically, these authors found support for a model in which engagement predicted job crafting, which in turn predicted demands–abilities fit (i.e., whether an employee’s skills match the requirements of the job) and needs–supplies fit (i.e., whether the job represents what the employee is “looking for” in their work). A very similar finding was recently found in a sample of 246 Taiwanese hotel employees (Chen, Yen, & Tsai, 2014). Specifically, this study found that both individual and collaborative crafting were related to job engagement, and this relation was mediated by person–job fit. Hence, there is some evidence that job crafting is an antecedent to perceptions of person–job fit, and a possible reason for this is that job crafting allows employees to align the job with their intrinsic needs and preferences. However, it is worth noting that an important discrepancy between the Chen et al. (2014) and Lu et al. (2014) studies was where engagement was placed in the model – the former study hypothesized engagement as the antecedent whereas in the latter it was the outcome variable. Accordingly, there are some conflicting results about whether job crafting is an antecedent or outcome of work engagement and future research is obviously needed to better establish the causal ordering of the variables.
Qualitative research has also shown some support for these findings, suggesting that job crafting is a method employees use to align the job with their motivations for working. Berg, Grant, and Johnson (2010) conducted a qualitative investigation of 31 employees across a variety of sectors and found that various forms of agency associated with job crafting (e.g., adding tasks to the job, altering one’s perception of one’s role) were used to pursue “unanswered occupational callings” – which they defined as unrealized potential occupations that employees strongly desire because they expect to find them intrinsically enjoyable, meaningful, and consistent with their work identity. This finding suggests that job crafting may be a process employees use to facilitate the pleasurable psychological states that come with aligning the job they have with the job they expect to find more intrinsically enjoyable and meaningful.
In short, the evidence provides preliminary support for a theoretical process where employees engage in job crafting to align their work experiences with their intrinsically driven needs, motives, and preferences. By creating more advanced integration and alignment between themselves and the working context, employees are able to exercise more internally driven, intrinsically motivated pursuits and behaviors – potentially increasing their work engagement, well‐being, and person–job fit.
At present there are two contrasting models that explain how employees engage in job crafting. As described above, Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s (2001) original theoretical model posits that employees can craft their jobs in three distinct ways: through initiating changes to the tasks, the relationships, or the cognitions they have about their work. By initiating changes to these three features of the job, employees alter how the work is experienced and can shift the job toward more desired preferences, needs, and motives. Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s (2001) model of job crafting contrasts with a more recent theoretical position put forward by proponents of the JD‐R model of stress and engagement (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Bakker, Demerouti, & Schaufeli, 2003; Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2000, 2001). As most of the empirical work on job crafting has focused on the JD‐R model, it will be reviewed here before addressing how it relates to job crafting.
JD‐R scholars describe the JD‐R model as a balance theory of employee well‐being, positing that exhaustion or engagement can arise from a disturbance in the equilibrium between two competing forces on employee health: the demands or resources experienced on the job. Job demands refers to the physical, psychological, social, and organizational features of a job that require sustained physical and mental effort, and are thus associated with corresponding physiological or psychological costs. A high‐pressure job, for example, may lead employees to exercise sustained cognitive effort for longer working hours. Such a sustained effort depletes energy and can therefore lead to a range of costs, both physiological (e.g., fatigue, tiredness, tension) and psychological (e.g., disengagement, depression, burnout, anxiety). Other possible examples of job demands include changes in work tasks, emotional stresses, or computer problems. While this strain process explains the relationship between job demands and outcomes such as exhaustion and disengagement, a separate motivational process explains what helps individuals to maintain their physical and psychological health while under the pressure of job demands. Job resources refers to the physical, psychological, social, and organizational features of a job that offer employees any of a range of benefits, including (1) aiding the attainment of work goals; (2) stimulating learning, growth or development; or (3) reducing or “buffering” the experience of job demands and their associated psychological and physiological costs. Examples of job resources are autonomy, task feedback or advice, and role clarity.
Proponents of the JD‐R model suggest that its dual processes play a role in the development of job strain and motivation both directly and through an interaction effect (see Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Some studies offer some support for the dual process hypothesis. Bakker, Demerouti, and Schaufeli (2003), for example, examined job demands and resources in 447 Dutch call‐center employees. They found that job demands (e.g., workload, computer problems) predicted health problems, which in turn predicted absenteeism – offering some support for the strain process. They also found that job resources (e.g., social support, feedback) predicted job involvement, which in turn predicted turnover intentions – offering some support for the motivational process. Hakanen, Bakker, and Schaufeli (2006) found similar results in a sample of 2,038 Finnish teachers. Specifically, this study found that job demands (e.g., pupil misbehavior) predicted burnout, and in turn ill health, whereas job resources (e.g., job control) predicted work engagement, and in turn organizational commitment. Other cross‐sectional studies have largely shown similar results, offering support of the JD‐R model across a variety of occupational groups (e.g., Bakker, Demerouti, Taris, Schaufeli, & Schreurs, 2003; Hakanen, Bakker, & Demerouti, 2005).
Tests of the JD‐R model using longitudinal research designs are less common. However, the longitudinal studies to date have generally provided at least some support for its theoretical propositions. Hakanen, Schaufeli, and Ahola (2008) used cross‐lagged tests of two waves of data over a 3‐year period from a sample of 2,555 Finnish dentists. They found that job demands predicted future burnout, which in turn predicted depression. Although job resources predicted future work engagement, and in turn organizational commitment, the correlations in support of the motivational process were quite small in this study (e.g., γ = .08, p < .01 for job resources → work engagement). Schaufeli, Bakker, and van Rhenen (2009) examined the dual processes in a sample of 201 Dutch managers and executives and found stronger correlations for both processes in the model, though their data spanned only one year. Therefore, although longitudinal evidence shows some support for the dual processes, the relationships are generally much smaller than the cross‐sectional evidence.
Although some research has provided support for the demands × resources interaction – suggesting that employee well‐being is highest when job demands are low and job resources are present – the findings are more mixed. Xanthopoulou et al. (2007) used a cross‐sectional design with 747 Dutch home care employees. Using moderated structural equation modeling, as well as synergistic tests, they found that high job demands coincided with high levels of exhaustion and cynicism, but only when job resources (i.e., feedback and opportunities for professional development) were low. The authors concluded that job resources buffer the effect of job demands on burnout. Bakker, Hakanen, Demerouti, and Xanthopoulou (2007) found support for 14 of 18 interaction tests in a sample of 805 Finnish teachers. Specifically, they largely found that job resources coincide with work engagement, particularly when job demands are high – concluding that job resources become more salient when demands are high.
Other studies have found more mixed results. Hu, Schaufeli, and Taris (2011) examined the additive and moderating effects of job demands and resources on burnout and engagement in two Chinese samples: 625 blue‐collar employees and 761 health care professionals. While these authors found support for the strain and motivational processes in the model, they found only weak support for the relationship between the demands × resources interaction and burnout (γ = –.08, p < .05) in the health care sample, and in the blue‐collar sample it was not significant. Moreover, the interaction failed to predict engagement in either sample. This is consistent with more recent research using cross‐cultural comparisons between Australia and China, where the interaction tests largely failed to reach statistical significance (Brough et al., 2013). Overall, while the dual processes of the JD‐R model have received relatively robust support with cross‐sectional evidence, and to an extent the longitudinal evidence, the support for the demands × resources interaction is more mixed.
Although JD‐R scholars were originally interested in the role of demands and resources as they were experienced through the design of jobs – hence taking the view that employees were passive recipients of their work context – more recent inquiry has adopted the view that employees take a more active role in shaping the demands and resources they experience on the job (e.g., Tims & Bakker, 2010; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2012). Hence, these authors frame their conceptualization of job crafting1 within the JD‐R model by suggesting that employees craft their jobs through actions that shift the levels of job demands and resources in desired directions. More specifically, this model posits that employees craft their work in four possible ways: (1) increasing their structural job resources (e.g., taking opportunities to learn new things, taking steps to develop themselves): (2) increasing social job resources (e.g., requesting feedback and advice, taking opportunities to be mentored); (3) decreasing hindering job demands (e.g., minimizing contact with people whose expectations are unrealistic, avoiding difficult decisions); or (4) increasing challenging job demands (e.g., starting new projects when time allows for it, volunteering to work on projects that aid learning or promote a sense of challenge) (Tims & Bakker 2010; Tims et al., 2012).
Through shaping the demands and resources experienced at work, employees are able to drive changes to their job characteristics and, in turn, contribute to work engagement, less burnout, and increased performance. This theoretical model has received some empirical support. Tims, Bakker, and Derks (2013), for example, conducted a longitudinal investigation on 288 chemical plant employees. They showed that employees who crafted their work such that they increased their job resources during the first month of the study experienced enhanced well‐being (i.e., increased engagement and job satisfaction, and less burnout) over the course of the study than those who did not engage in JD‐R crafting. More recently, Petrou, Demerouti, and Schaufeli (2015, March 23) examined two‐wave longitudinal data from 580 police officers undergoing organizational change over a 1‐year period. They found that seeking job resources and job challenges at Time 1 predicted higher task performance and lower exhaustion at Time 2 (after the organizational change was implemented). The findings suggest that JD‐R crafting is a potential strategy for employees to cope with organizational change. These findings have been extended to the team level, where it has been found that collaborative JD‐R crafting predicts team‐level performance and engagement (McClelland, Leach, Clegg, & McGowan, 2014; Tims, Bakker, Derks, & van Rhenen, 2013).
Nielsen and Abildgaard (2012) modified the JD‐R crafting model to capture further elements of job demands that are more relevant for blue‐collar employees. These authors found that some aspects of JD‐R crafting (i.e., increasing challenging job demands and quantitative job demands) predicted work engagement 12 months later. Although increasing quantitative job demands and social job resources predicted job satisfaction after 12 months, none of the JD‐R crafting facets predicted burnout at follow‐up (all p’s > .05). More recent research has largely supported these findings, suggesting that JD‐R crafting is related to work engagement (e.g., Brenninkmeijer & Hekkert‐Koning, 2015).
While the vast majority of the empirical research on job crafting and JD‐R crafting is correlational, recently a study was conducted to test the potential individual consequences of a JD‐R crafting intervention in a sample of Dutch police (n = 39) (van den Heuvel, Demerouti, & Peeters, 2015). The intervention consisted of a full‐day training where participants learned about the JD‐R model and subsequently generated work goals based on crafting their work by seeking resources (e.g., asking a colleague for feedback), reducing hindering demands (e.g., making use of travel time to type up reports), and seeking challenging demands (e.g., participating in a negotiation to build negotiation skills). Participants then worked on their goals over a 4‐week period which focused on making these self‐initiated modifications to their job demands and resources. Results indicated some preliminary support for the efficacy of the intervention. For example, at post‐test, the intervention group recorded enhanced opportunities for development, leader–member exchange, and self‐efficacy, as well as lower negative affect. While none of these differences were observed in the control group, the time × group interaction (which considers the intervention and control groups simultaneously) failed to reach statistical significance on any of the outcomes. While further work is clearly needed using larger samples, the study presents promising results for the efficacy of interventions in enhancing work outcomes for employees.
In sum, proponents of the JD‐R model suggest that people craft their jobs by shaping the job demands and job resources they face at work. While this view offers a unique theoretical perspective, a limitation is that it does not account for the role that cognitions have in shaping work identity (Slemp & Vella‐Brodrick, 2013). Another potential limitation is that it offers a somewhat prescriptive view of how employees might shape their experience of work for the better. Accordingly, it is unclear whether actions that conform to the original theoretical model of job crafting (e.g., people who craft their job by decreasing their social interactions at work – such as hairdressers who “fire clients,” Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001, p. 191) might fall outside the conceptual space of the JD‐R model. Nonetheless, the literature on the whole suggests that JD‐R crafting might be a promising method for employees to potentially enhance their work engagement and performance, as well as reduce levels of burnout.
Job crafting is typically viewed as a form of proactive behavior or intentional agency that has positive implications for both individuals and organizations. Yet few studies have explored contextual variables that potentially impede, limit, or, conversely, enable employees’ capacity to craft their jobs in organizations. Consistent with several studies showing that job autonomy is a contextual antecedent to agentic behavior in organizations (Crant, 2000; Parker, Williams, & Turner, 2006), the extent to which employees have the autonomy, or perceived autonomy, to initiate changes to their experience of work is likely to influence their ability to implement job crafting. Petrou, Demerouti, Peeters, Schaufeli, & Hetland (2012) found preliminary support for this using a daily diary measure of job autonomy and JD‐R crafting. These authors found that in “active jobs” – defined as jobs that are not only highly demanding but also provide high job control – employees typically engage in more JD‐R crafting. More specifically, using moderated structural equation modeling, they found that the combination of day‐level work pressure and day‐level job autonomy predicted day‐level seeking resources and day‐level reducing demands. Within the SDT literature, a similar social‐contextual factor that has received some research attention is autonomy support (Baard et al., 2004; Deci, Connell, & Ryan, 1989), which is defined as an interpersonal orientation by those in positions of leadership or authority that supports the inner motivational resources of their employees. For example, autonomy supportive managers take steps to acknowledge and understand subordinates’ perspectives, offer opportunities for choice and volition, and encourage self‐initiation (Deci et al., 2001). Conversely, managers with a controlling style – generally considered the antipode of an autonomy supportive style – will tend to place pressure on their staff to think, feel, or behave in a particular way.
As job crafting is a form of proactive behavior self‐initiated by employees, autonomy‐supportive work contexts are theoretically more likely to enable this type of workplace agency. In other words, employees will craft their jobs to the extent to which they feel they have the autonomy and scope to initiate changes to their experience of work. Yet at the same time research shows that the work context is not stable and fixed, but rather is malleable to change (Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010), suggesting that employees can initiate changes to produce more autonomy supportiveness into their roles. Berg, Wrzesniewski, and Dutton (2010) coined the term “adaptive moves” to describe the cognitive or behavioral responses that employees make to overcome perceived challenges to initiating job crafting. In this study, one adaptive move relevant for lower‐ranked employees in particular, who might typically experience lower levels of autonomy support, was to change others’ expectations and behaviors toward their work environments in order to enable more scope for job crafting.
Taken together, these findings suggest a possible reciprocal relationship between job crafting and autonomy support – where employees can engage in more job crafting in contexts in which they enjoy a high‐level of perceived autonomy supportiveness, and vice versa; the work context is malleable and employees can craft more autonomy supportiveness into their roles. This process was supported by a recent cross‐sectional study that found job crafting and autonomy support were reciprocally related (Slemp, Kern, & Vella‐Brodrick, 2015). This study also found a synergistic relationship between job crafting and autonomy support with employee well‐being. The synergistic relationship suggests that even though job crafting and autonomy support independently predicted employee well‐being, well‐being tended to be highest when both autonomy support and job crafting were present. Although it needs to be replicated with longitudinal data, these findings offer preliminary evidence of a process in organizations where both job crafting and autonomy support may reciprocally enable one another, which potentially has promising effects for employee well‐being.
Some research also suggests that job crafting might be an employee‐driven response to the experience of work‐related boredom. For example, while certain personality factors (e.g., boredom proneness; Vodanovich, 2003) predict boredom, research also suggests that boredom is created through social‐contextual factors (e.g., too little work, repetition, monotony; Loukidou, Loan‐Clarke, & Daniels, 2009). To examine the relationship between work‐related boredom and self‐regulatory behaviors such as job crafting (which they operationalized as JD‐R crafting), van Hooff and van Hooft (2014) conducted a 1‐month longitudinal investigation among a sample of 189 Dutch employees. They found that employees who were experiencing higher boredom at work were more likely to seek to increase their challenging job demands and their structural job resources. Accordingly, JD‐R crafting is a potential coping mechanism employees might use to manage work‐related boredom and its adverse potential consequences.
In sum, the literature supports a set of relationships where autonomy‐supportive work climates predict job crafting, and indicates that employees can also take action to craft more autonomy supportiveness into their roles. Moreover, work contexts that are likely to produce work‐related boredom may drive employees to craft the job in order to lessen the negative experience of boredom at work.
While much of the research on job crafting has been conducted under the assumption that it has positive consequences for employees and organizations, recent research is beginning to emerge showing that it also has a potential downside. Much of this research has focused on JD‐R crafting. For example, one study examined JD‐R crafting within dyads, focusing on whether crafting by one team member was related to the job characteristics and well‐being of his or her partner (Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2015,). The study found that when one team member sought to reduce their hindering job demands, the partner was more likely to report a higher workload and conflict, which in turn predicted partner burnout. While the findings are correlational, they are consistent with the pattern that some types of JD‐R crafting might consist of shifting responsibility for particular tasks to team members, which may have a corresponding impact on partner workload and burnout. Other recent studies have found similar undesirable potential correlates. Demerouti, Bakker, and Halbesleben (2015), for example, conducted a daily diary study over a period of 5 days to determine whether daily JD‐R crafting was related to daily job performance (which they operationalized with measures of self‐reported task performance, altruism, and counterproductive work behavior). They found that daily reportings of seeking job resources was positively related to daily task performance, which was potentially explained by employee autonomy and work engagement correspondingly increasing over the 5 days. However, on days where employees sought to reduce their job demands, their daily task performance was lower – perhaps explained by employee workloads and work engagement decreasing over the 5 days. Interestingly, on days where employees sought more challenges they also tended to show more counterproductive work behavior (e.g., hiding mistakes, gossiping, etc.). Hence, this study shows a potential negative side effect of both reducing job demands and increasing challenges. One further study has shown an unfavorable potential outcome of JD‐R crafting (Petrou et al., 2015). These authors found that seeking to reduce job demands is positively related to employee exhaustion one year later. While the correlation was quite small, a possible explanation for this effect is that employees who seek to reduce their workload might put less effort into their tasks, which potentially increases their workload and aggravates their exhaustion.
Overall, while much of the research on job crafting indeed shows that it has valued correlates and empirical outcomes, some studies have shown that there are also unfavorable potential consequences. In particular, it appears that when employees craft their job by seeking to reduce their job demands, they may do so by transferring their tasks to their colleagues. Moreover, it is possible that during the process of reducing their job demands they also put less effort into their own tasks, which potentially increases their exhaustion.
There are various models available that offer accounts about how employees might craft their jobs in order to alter their experience of work for the better. Some authors have offered suggestions that align with the facets of task, relational, and cognitive crafting (e.g., Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2013; Wrzesniewski et al., 2010). Similarly, much of the empirical literature thus far has focused on the JD‐R model, suggesting that employees should focus their attention on shifting their job demands and resources in desired directions (Tims et al., 2012; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013). As these theoretical applications have been extensively covered elsewhere, this section will focus on possible methods of job crafting that align with SDT. Accordingly, it will focus primarily on ways job crafting could aid employees to integrate their natural preferences and dispositions into their work experiences, potentially enabling greater alignment between the individual and the working environment. Some scholars have made a useful start toward this end. The Job Crafting Exercise (Berg Dutton, Wrzesniewski, & Baker, 2008), for example, is a practical tool that aims to assist employees to identify and use their inner motives, passions, and strengths at work, which, theoretically, should help employees better integrate with the work environment. This section will further explore relevant concepts in the literature that, if enacted on the job, might help employees craft their tasks, relationships, or cognitions to align with their intrinsic preferences and dispositions.
Goal setting forms an important function in most jobs and careers, as well as being a useful way for employees to push their task boundaries in the pursuit of personal aspirations. Several goal‐setting models and frameworks exist (see Locke & Latham, 2002), but the goal self‐concordance approach (Sheldon, 2014; Sheldon & Elliot, 1998, 1999) is a useful goal‐setting framework for aligning the experience of work with the needs of the self. The model suggests that goals that originate from the deepest point of human agency – the integrated self where one’s most inner and authentic interests, values, needs, and motives lie – are where employees can craft a more integrated and intrinsically motivating experience of work. Further, self‐concordant goals are more likely to be attained because they lead to more persistent goal effort (Koestner, Lekes, Powers, & Chicoine, 2002; Sheldon & Elliot, 1998, 1999). Similarly, evidence suggests that self‐concordant goals help to enable optimal psychological functioning, including motivation, satisfaction, and well‐being (Sheldon, 2014; Sheldon & Houser‐Marko, 2001; Sheldon, Ryan, Deci, & Kasser, 2004). For goals to be self‐concordant, they must be (1) autonomous and volitional, and (2) intrinsically motivating and rewarding, presumably because the goals reflect innate psychological needs such as those for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
Although much of the self‐concordant motivation literature has focused on students, goal self‐concordance is very relevant to the workplace, which offers individuals a context for goal pursuits. Therefore, consistent with the notion that job crafting can develop over long periods of time (Wrzesniewski et al., 2013), it is possible that employees can craft their task boundaries in the pursuit of self‐concordant work goals. Self‐concordant goals represent people’s interests and passions, as well as their central values and beliefs. By generating and pursuing objectives that reflect this but are also are relevant to the job, employees can potentially reshape their work toward a more meaningful, engaging, and intrinsically driven experience. In particular, self‐concordant goals offer employees a way to integrate activities that are deeply enjoyable, interesting, and intrinsically valuable – areas of passion (Vallerand et al., 2003) – into their work. Supporting this, studies have found that self‐concordant goal pursuits at work predict life satisfaction and self‐reported goal attainment (Judge, Bono, Erez, & Locke, 2005; study 2). Ultimately, pursuing self‐concordance may help employees craft new organization into their work tasks and allow them to steer their work in desired and meaningful directions (Sheldon, 2014).
While proponents of self‐concordant goals are concerned with sources of motivation for work, employees might also craft their tasks by re‐orienting their attention toward leveraging what they are naturally “good at” in relation to their work. Put simply, employees might look for ways to use areas of strength – defined broadly as the individual characteristics that allow people to perform well or at their personal best (Wood, Linley, Maltby, Kashdan, & Hurling, 2011). By doing so, employees are able to push their task boundaries by focusing their energy on doing what they naturally do well and that which they find energizing. As an example, a qualitative study found that a customer service representative who was very skilled and talented with computers took steps to become the “go‐to person” for his colleagues when they required computer‐related assistance (Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010). While being expert with computers is a useful but perhaps unnecessary skill for a customer service assistant, offering his expertise to colleagues enabled this individual to add desirable tasks to his job and was a way in which he was able to exercise an area of strength at work.
There is now a strong literature on the mental health correlates and outcomes that follow from using strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005), and Gallup strengths data suggest that using strengths at work may help employees to become more engaged (see Clifton & Harter, 2003; Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002; Hodges & Clifton, 2004). Moreover, evidence suggests that using strengths predicts intrinsic need satisfaction (Linley, Nielsen, Gillett, & Biswas‐Diener, 2010), suggesting that, similar to self‐concordant goals, strengths perhaps reflect inner preferences or dispositions and that using strengths at work is a way to better integrate with the work context. Accordingly, identifying tasks and opportunities to use strengths at work is a promising way in which employees can re‐orient their jobs toward the use of their natural talents and dispositions, which may help them to integrate what they naturally do well into their working environment.
Humans are strongly and deeply driven by the need to feel belongingness and connection with others (see Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Given the workplace provides a context for people to exist in close proximity for extended periods of the day (or night), it offers an important medium through which they can satisfy this fundamental need. Yet the way in which people develop and cultivate relationships is idiosyncratic and, through relational crafting, people can potentially tailor how they cultivate work‐based connections based on individual needs and preferences. As an example, the workplace generally offers people the opportunity to invest and integrate into larger spheres of social relationships as well as the opportunity to develop and foster more dyadic, personal, and nurturing relationships with others (see Baumeister & Sommer, 1997), such as those experienced in high‐quality connections (Dutton & Heaphy, 2003). Depending on individual needs and preferences, employees might craft their jobs so that they can orient toward larger spheres of social relations (e.g., joining, chairing, or creating committees; joining or leading large project, cross‐functional, or hierarchical teams), whereas others might craft their jobs toward smaller numbers of close relationships (e.g., opting to coach or mentor others, opting to receive coaching or mentoring; collaborating on smaller project teams).
Personality and dispositional characteristics may also influence preferences about how employees relate to others. Perhaps one of the more obvious personality characteristics to potentially influence relational preferences, given sociality is one of its central features, is introversion–extraversion. Although introverts and extraverts both tend to be happier when they have solid social connections (Hotard, McFatter, McWhirter, & Stegall, 1989), they may opt to forge connections in different ways. Eysenck’s (1967) early view of the trait suggested that extraverted people require more social stimulation to satisfy their higher threshold for arousal, while introverts, endowed with a lower arousal threshold, perhaps require less social interaction. Such a view would suggest that for some people it may make more sense to deepen and strengthen the quality of their existing relationships than to take opportunities to establish new relationships with broad networks and wide groups of people. A more recent perspective suggests that a central feature of extraversion is agency – a more general disposition encompassing factors such as ambition, dominance, assertiveness, efficacy, achievement, and exhibitionism (Depue & Collins, 1999). This perhaps suggests that employees high on extraversion might enjoy crafting leadership activities into their roles, or pursuing situations where their skills can be put on display. Such factors might also be considered during career mobility. For example, whereas some people could strive for positions that involve leading or managing large groups of people, others may be more suited to progress their career in different ways (e.g., opting to extend their skills and expertise).
Despite few empirical studies having explored cognitive crafting, theorizing by organizational scholars has uncovered a variety of ways in which people can craft more meaningful and positive cognitions about their work, potentially more congruent with their work identity. This is particularly revealing within the literature on “dirty work,” which refers broadly to occupations that are necessary for a functional society, but are considered low‐status, stigmatized, degrading, or “tainted” in either a physical, social, or moral sense (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Ashforth, Kreiner, Clark, & Fugate, 2007). Ashforth and Kreiner (1999, 2013) suggest that occupations can be physically tainted if they are associated with garbage, death, or human waste (e.g., funeral director, janitor) or if they are dangerous (e.g., soldier, miner). Occupations can be socially tainted if they involve regular contact with stigmatized groups (e.g., prison guard, psychiatric ward attendant) or if the worker appears to adopt a subservient role to others (e.g., shoe‐shiner, butler, maid). Finally, jobs can be morally tainted if they are regarded as sinful and/or appear to be devoid of moral principle or virtue (e.g., exotic dancer, sex worker, abortion worker). Yet even though many of these occupations are stigmatized, research suggests that employees within them develop strong workgroup cultures as particular ideologies become shared among the groups’ members (see Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999).
Ashforth and Kreiner (1999, 2013) describe three cognitive strategies through which “dirty workers” are able to transform the meaning of the work by negating its negative attributions and instead associating it with positive qualities. First, workers can engage in reframing, which involves flooding the stigma of the work with positive value, ultimately wearing it as a “badge of honor” (e.g., a funeral director might see that they are facilitating the grieving process for the bereaved rather than profiting from their loss). Second, workers can use a technique known as recalibrating, which involves adjusting the evaluative standards against which the work tasks are assessed. By utilizing this technique, seemingly insignificant and unimportant tasks can be recalibrated as necessary and even fundamental for human kind (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999, 2003; Dik, Duffy, & Eldridge, 2009). For example, a hospital cleaner might note the importance of their role for the safe delivery of routine and complicated medical procedures (Dutton, Debebe, & Wrzesniewski, 2012). While reframing involves transforming the stigmatized properties of a job into positive qualities, workers can also shift their attention from the stigmatized features of the job to its non‐stigmatized features – a cognitive strategy called refocusing (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999, 2013). This can involve shifting attention to positive extrinsic features of the job (such as high pay or flexible hours) or it can involve shifting attention to its positive intrinsic qualities (such as the pleasantness associated with working outdoors). The three cognitive shaping strategies allow employees to further appreciate the features of the job that are enjoyable, beneficial, or that serve to make the job worthy of their time, energy, and motivation.
While these three cognitive shaping strategies were initially conceptualized as ways in which “dirty workers” create a more positive work identity, it is quite easy to envisage how they could also be useful for other occupational groups that are not considered in the domain of dirty work. For example, employees within high‐stress occupations (e.g., teachers/social workers; Johnson et al., 2005) might choose to redirect their attention and reflect on those parts of the job that are less stressful or more enjoyable (refocusing). Men or women working in traditionally gender‐imbalanced occupations might see their minority status as a source of pride and inspiration for others with similar aspirations in that line of work, hence wearing it as a badge of honor (reframing; e.g., Eisenberg, 1999; O’Lynn, 2007). Commercial aircraft pilots might spend some time reflecting on their vital function for global businesses heavily reliant on international travel for the successful operations of geographically distributed subsidiaries (recalibrating; Beaverstock, Derudder, Faulconbridge, & Witlox, 2009). Ultimately, such cognitive crafting strategies give employees a way to ascribe greater meaning and purpose to the tasks and to their job more broadly, which may also help to align it with their intrinsic motives for doing such work.
Until recently, most of the inquiry into job crafting provided a theoretical review or a qualitative investigation into the construct (e.g., Berg, Grant, & Johnson, 2010; Berg, Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2010; Fried, Grant, Levi, Hadani & Slowik, 2007; Lyons, 2008; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). While this research was particularly important to help consolidate what constitutes job crafting and how it potentially differs from similar forms of proactive workplace behavior (Tims et al., 2012), only a few studies had made attempts to study it using quantitative methods (e.g., Ghitulescu, 2006; Leana et al., 2009). The empirical research showed promising desired potential correlates and outcomes of job crafting, including job satisfaction, commitment, performance, and absenteeism. However, the scales used were context‐specific (manufacturing and education, respectively) and hence were not appropriate for use with the general working population. Consequently, recent attempts have been made to address this deficiency and thus produce scales that are more applicable and relevant for general working populations (e.g., Slemp & Vella‐Brodrick, 2013; Tims et al., 2012). Accordingly, empirical research on job crafting has increased substantially over the past three years.
Nonetheless, there are still some significant limitations with much of the existing literature and future research is needed to address these. First, many studies have used cross‐sectional methods (Slemp & Vella‐Brodrick, 2014; Slemp et al., 2015; Tims, Bakker, Derks, & van Rhenen, 2013), longitudinal self‐report data (Nielsen & Abildgaard, 2012; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013), or daily diary methods (e.g., Demerouti et al., 2015; Petrou et al., 2012; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2014) and we still need to better understand whether job crafting is a causal factor in creating enhanced employee engagement and well‐being, or merely a by‐product. While a recent study has made a promising start with a quasi‐experimental field intervention (van den Heuvel et al., 2015), the results are preliminary and future research efforts can extend this study by using larger samples, randomization, and longer follow‐up periods. Such methods will better establish whether job crafting is a causal factor in enhancing the employee experience of work. Second, the existing measures are quite prescriptive about the types of activities that constitute job crafting (e.g., Ghitulescu, 2006; Leana et al., 2009; Slemp & Vella‐Brodrick, 2013; Tims et al., 2012). Accordingly, they are only capable of capturing a limited range of information and are thus restricted in their ability to fully capture the breadth of activities that might constitute job crafting within the working environment. Future studies might consider moving beyond self‐report survey data and instead exploring potentially more rigorous indicators of job crafting and well‐being within naturalistic settings. For example, day reconstruction (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) or experience sampling (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987) would provide useful and rich insight into the potential situational or temporal predictors of job crafting, as well as its real‐time correlates and potential consequences. In particular, it would potentially account for a fuller range of agency that might constitute job crafting rather than the comparatively limited range that can be captured through the current self‐report tools.
Third, future research should also further explore the situational, contextual, or “top‐down” variables that moderate job crafting in organizations. Indeed, a possible criticism of job crafting is its emphasis on individual responsibility in creating a more optimal experience of work, potentially at the expense of those factors that are often beyond the employee’s direct control but clearly affect the subjective quality of the working experience. While the concept of job crafting is promising because it suggests individuals can play a role in shaping how they approach their job – individual agency in organizations, including job crafting, is typically influenced by a variety of contextual factors within organizations (e.g., management, job design, climate) (see Johns, 2006). Future research needs to explore the variety of “top‐down” or contextual factors that may interact with the employee’s ability to enact job crafting and the consequent effect on employee mental health outcomes. Such a line of research will strengthen our understanding of how the organizational context shapes workplace behavior and employee mental health, ultimately informing best practices in management to better enable job crafting in organizations.
Finally, most of the current research on job crafting has studied its positive correlates and consequences and we still need a better understanding of its potential negative consequences or possible side effects. More recent studies are beginning to explore these questions (as reviewed earlier), and future studies need to continue this line of research, exploring more distal potential consequences of job crafting (e.g., organizational performance). Furthermore, research needs to incorporate the use of more objective data (e.g., absenteeism, performance review metrics) to better establish its correlates beyond self‐report data.
Job crafting offers employees a novel way in which they can alter their subjective experience of work. Two theoretical processes explain how this might occur. First, job crafting offers a potential process employees can use to better align the job with their intrinsic preferences, potentially enabling greater coherence and consistency between their internally driven, authentic selves and their working context. This process of alignment potentially allows for the satisfaction of intrinsic psychological needs and enhanced employee well‐being. Goal self‐concordance, using strengths and talents, aligning work with idiosyncratic preferences for sociality, and crafting meaningful cognitions about work are just some of the ways employees might align their work with their intrinsic interests and needs. A second theoretical model is that it presents an opportunity for employees to change the job demands and resources they face at work, which may ultimately aid their ability to shape their job characteristics and, in turn their work engagement and well‐being. Job crafting is correlated with autonomy‐supportive work environments and employees are more likely to use job crafting when they work in environments where they feel bored. Further, while job crafting generally has positive consequences, it can have unfavorable potential outcomes – particularly when employees seek to reduce their job demands by transferring tasks to their team members or placing less effort into their tasks. Nonetheless, job crafting gives people a way to inject new organization into their work experiences, allowing them to steer their work tasks, relationships, and cognitions in a direction that is consistent with their intrinsic motives and preferences, ultimately creating a different, more intrinsically driven experience of the job.