Job crafting through the lens of exploitation and exploration: A daily diary study on job crafting towards strengths and development

Abstract This study investigates how employees engage in two distinct job crafting strategies by either leveraging their existing strengths (job crafting towards strengths, JC‐strengths) or pursuing personal development (job crafting towards development, JC‐development) through the lens of exploitation and exploration. We propose that JC‐strengths, as an exploitative strategy, enhances task performance, whereas JC‐development, as an explorative strategy, boosts creative performance. We further propose that job autonomy enables both JC‐strengths and JC‐development by affording discretion in how work is shaped, while a strong performance‐pay link serves as a directional signal by reinforcing exploitation‐oriented crafting (JC‐strengths) and discouraging exploration‐oriented crafting (JC‐development) in the presence of job autonomy. Conducting a 10‐day daily survey among 115 employees, our findings confirmed the hypothesized distinct effects of JC‐strengths and JC‐development on task and creative performance on a daily basis, respectively. Moreover, daily job autonomy was found to be significantly related to daily JC‐strengths, especially when coupled with a high performance‐pay link. However, the expected effect of daily job autonomy on daily JC‐development and the cross‐level moderating effect of performance‐pay link on this relationship were not significant.