Is Teacher Collaboration Enough? The Essential Role of Job Crafting in Supporting Teachers' Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction

ABSTRACT Teachers' basic psychological need satisfaction (BPNS) is essential for their professional development. Although teacher collaboration is often regarded as a key affordance for BPNS, its actual influence on different psychological needs and the mechanisms involved remain underexplored. Drawing on self‐determination theory and job crafting concept, this study investigates how teacher collaboration affects the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) through five types of job crafting behaviours. Structural equation modelling and bootstrapping analyses were conducted on data collected from 1954 teachers in China. The results reveal that collaboration alone is insufficient to enhance BPNS; its effects are largely channelled through teachers' job crafting behaviours. Job crafting fully mediates the relationship between collaboration and competence need satisfaction and partially mediates its effects on autonomy and relatedness. Importantly, the findings highlight that each type of BPNS is shaped by distinct antecedent mechanisms. For instance, increasing structural job resources is most strongly associated with relatedness, while optimising job demands is most linked to competence, and decreasing hindering demands negatively relates to autonomy. These findings deepen understanding of the antecedent mechanisms of teachers' BPNS by elucidating how collaborative school contexts interact with teachers' job crafting behaviours. Practical implications for designing targeted education programmes and fostering supportive school environments are also discussed.