Career Competencies, Job Crafting and Innovation Behavior: Insights from Yin-Yang Harmony Cognition

Abstract

Nowadays the career landscape faced with the constant increase of uncertainties, innovation requirements and unemployment rate has aggravated the career crisis among the front-line technical workers in the manufacturing industry, which indicates that the front-line technical workers have to enhance career competencies（CCs）and realize individual innovation to cope with complex and changeable environmental demands. However, the existing literature puts more focus on the innovative workplace behavior（IWB）of knowledgeable staff and limited research has investigated how front-line technical workers display IWB. Given this, our study integrates the perspectives of Chinese culture（i.e., the Yin-Yang harmony cognitive framework）and Western “job demands-resources”（JD-R）theory, proposing a moderated mediation model of CCs, job crafting（JC）and IWB, and constructing the hypothesis based on the model.The research was conducted in the form of questionnaires, and the variables were assessed with validated scales. In order to reduce common method variance, we collected data across two waves. At time1, we chose front-line technical workers from 5 manufacturing firms in Guangxi Province to measure CC（antecedent）and related control variables in 2019. Then at time2, we only included participants who responded to the first survey to provide information on JC（mediator）and IWB（outcome variables）in 2020. The study finally obtained 371 useable samples, while the exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchy regression analysis were adopted to generate empirical results.The findings show that the three dimensions of CC（i.e., reflective, communicative, and behavioral CC）are positively related to IWB, respectively; the three dimensions of CC（i.e., reflective, communicative, and behavioral CC）significantly promote JC and through which to further enhance IWB; the communicative CC enhances the impacts of reflective CC and behavioral CC on JC, based on which it further increases IWB. In sum, this study examines the mediating role of JC and the moderating role of communicative CC. Moreover, we clarify the mechanism between the various dimensions of CC and its interaction with IWB, enriching the literature of career competencies and innovation in the field, and expanding the scope of application of JD-R theory.Our study makes several contributions to the literature: First, it focuses on investigating the issues regarding the career development of front-line technical workers, which were not paid sufficient attention to for a long time but have had a great impact on societal stability. It indicates that the front-line technical workers can promote innovation by enhancing their CCs, thus illuminating the direction for employees’ career development in the future. Second, from the perspective of Yin-Yang harmony cognitive framework, it discovers the interacting and causal associations among the three dimensions of CCs, JC and IWB, as they mutually reinforce and complement each other. This offers a theoretical basis for the Yin-Yang philosophy. Third, whereas this research is conducted in a highly uncertain environment, our conclusion can help the government and human resource managers to understand the current adversities facing grassroots workers and provide concrete suggestions for policy-making.