Abstract
China’s manufacturing employees are confronted with unprecedent occupational and innovation challenges caused by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis coupled with the pressure of being replaced by digital technologies. To gain a better understanding of the rising occupational uncertainty during this critical time, based on the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, we examined the associations of employees’ job crafting behaviors (JCB) with their occupational satisfaction and innovation workplace behavior (IWB), as well as the mediating effect of work engagement on the above relationships. The final usable data were obtained from the formal survey of 311 employees of six manufacturing companies that have returned to work amid COVID-19. Structural equation modelling was adopted to analyze the data. Results show that employees’ JCB strengthens their occupational satisfaction and IWB via work engagement. Theoretically, our research enriches the existing body of knowledge about JCB from a cross-disciplinary angle integrating the perspectives of career and psychology. Practically, we offer valuable first-hand evidence about how manufacturing employees conducted JCB to re-orient their careers and to innovate in the face of the high unemployment situation.
Highlights
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has caused an unprecedent global recession, which is crunching the job market in China’s manufacturing industry
Workers may opt to conduct job crafting behaviors (JCB) for reaching a new balance of job resources and demands, so as to ameliorate their occupational uncertainty, realize innovation, and thereby achieve competitive advantages [7,8,9,10]. Following this line of thought, we focus on exploring the associations among employee JCB, occupational satisfaction, and innovative workplace behavior (IWB) here
The correlation results revealed that job crafting (JC) is positively associated with occupational satisfaction (r = 0.725, p < 0.01), IWB (r = 0.719, p < 0.01), and work engagement (r = 0.658, p < 0.01), and work engagement is positively related to IWB (r = 0.707, p < 0.01) and occupational satisfaction (r = 0.712, p < 0.01)
Summary
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has caused an unprecedent global recession, which is crunching the job market in China’s manufacturing industry. To reduce the number of human workers In this vein, production workers cannot confront the increasingly complex, more ICT-related job demands, while the low-skilled, less-educated and middle-aged workers who used to engage in simple, repetitive tasks in the past, are becoming less competitive and experiencing more job stress. In such a turbulent time, manufacturing employees may gradually lose their occupational satisfaction, as the success and progress they have made in their careers may not be sustainable. It implies the need of developing and encouraging innovative workplace behavior (IWB) among factory workers [1,2,3] to cope with such a tough situation. Some proactive workers tend to satisfy the rising job demands by undertaking job crafting behaviors (JCBs) [5,6,7,8], namely to take the initiatives to acquire new job-related resources, re-configure the resources within their jobs, or decrease hindering demands, with an aim to better align job characteristics with their own preferences and
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