Job crafting

The increasing popularity of self-managing teams, re-engineering and other organizational innovations, coupled with the increased flexibility in work arrangements made possible by advances in information technology, has considerably expanded the complexity of professional jobs. Consequently, each job position seems to be characterized by a unique constellation of working conditions that the organization can hardly be aware of. Not surprisingly, top-down organizational interventions to improve motivation and organizational performance often seem partly ineffective (Biron, Karanika-Murray, & Cooper, 2012). Therefore organizations have started to recognize that redesign approaches initiated by individuals or job holders themselves (bottom-up) should be promoted and combined with approaches initiated by the organization. The aim of this chapter is to zoom in on the process through which organizations can improve the working conditions for their employees by offering them the opportunity to do so themselves. This process is called job crafting and can be seen as a specific form of proactive behaviour in which the employee initiates changes in the level of job demands and job resources to make their own job more meaningful, engaging and satisfying. Our basic premise is that job crafting can be used next to top-down approaches to improve jobs in order to overcome the inadequacies of job redesign approaches. Job crafting can also be used to respond to the complexity of contemporary jobs and to deal with the needs of the current workforce. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the roots of job crafting, namely job redesign (Section 17.2). After presenting the inadequacies of classical job redesign approaches, we will continue with some attempts to individualize job redesign that can also be considered as precursors of job crafting. In the next section (Section 17.3), we provide an overview of job crafting as a job redesign approach and zoom in on its conceptualization and on its predictors and outcomes. In Section 17.4 we make the link between job crafting and the implementation of organizational change and innovation as these represent enduring requirements of modern organizations. As job crafting represents a relatively new construct in the literature, there are several issues that remain unresolved, as well as critical notes that can be made about it. These are presented in Section 17.5. In the following section (Section 17.6), we present some ideas on how to intervene and stimulate the job-crafting behaviour of employees. We end this chapter with some conclusions and suggestions for further reading (Section 17.7).