Crafting for sustainability: a daily diary study and self-training intervention on proactive employee engagement in sustainability

This research aims to stimulate employee engagement in sustainability by investigating whether self-initiated and trained job crafting functions as a behavioural tool to engage more in sustainability in daily work. Using a daily diary design in Study 1, we found that employees’ general attitude and perceptions of control towards sustainability predicted daily sustainability intentions which related to daily sustainability behaviour. Importantly, optimizing demands mediated the intention-behaviour gap. In Study 2, we tested a self-training intervention in which participants were encouraged to work on daily self-set crafting for sustainability goals. Results showed that the intervention group had increased sustainability intentions after the training. Furthermore, participants who actively followed the training increased more in optimizing demands throughout the training than control participants. The self-training did not affect overall proactive sustainability behaviour but resulted in increased specific sustainability activities through optimizing demands. Stimulating job crafting seems promising for implementing sustainability into organizational life.