Understanding the Science of Employee Job Crafting in Organizations

Job crafting is a topic within organizational psychology that is gaining interest due to its link to important workplace outcomes like burnout and job satisfaction. Job crafting is a bottom-up, individualized process that allows workers to make minor changes to the way they think about or approach their work tasks. Understanding how to help employees craft their jobs is important in organizations because it is often a quicker and cost-effective alternative to top-down, one-size-fits-all job redesign strategies aimed to improve different aspects of the work environment. There are two main conceptualizations of job crafting, which have produced two distinct self-report measures of behaviours. The first is a fifteen-item scale that divides job crafting into three categories: task, relational, and cognitive. The second is a twenty-one-item scale reflecting behaviours in four categories: increasing social job resources, increasing structural job resources, increasing challenging job demands, and reducing hindering job demands. Research also shows that both personal and work characteristics predict job crafting. Interventions aimed at increasing job crafting behaviours have generally followed a two-step process: having employees examine 1) their job tasks, and 2) the motivations associated with these tasks. Although these interventions have produced mixed results, research on job crafting is warranted due to its association with key organizational outcomes of interest. Thus, organizations may want to consider promoting job crafting behaviours among their employees to help improve employee motivation and well-being.