Engaged and Productive Misfits: How Job Crafting and Leisure Activity Mitigate the Negative Effects of Value Incongruence

The work life of “misfits”—employees whose important values are incongruent with the values of their organization—represents an under-researched area of the person–environment fit literature. The unfortunate reality is that these individuals are likely to be disengaged and unproductive at work. In this manuscript, we entertain the possibility that employees can protect themselves from this situation if they engage in alternative actions that supplement the fundamental needs that go unmet from value incongruence. We integrate theorizing about the motivational role of need fulfillment and work/nonwork behaviors in order to examine whether two actions in particular—job crafting and leisure activity—can potentially mitigate the negative effects of value incongruence on employee performance. The results from our field study of employees from diverse organizations and industries suggest that both job crafting and leisure activity do indeed act as a buffer, mitigating the otherwise negative effects of value incongruence on employee engagement and job performance (with regard to both task performance and citizenship behavior).