Abstract
Accelerated digitalization coupled with ever-growing new job demands in China’s manufacturing industry has led to serious concerns about rising work stress and the loss of the sustainability of careers among production workers. They are trapped within an organization due to the lack of career alternatives in the labor market; under such occupational stress, some proactive workers may engage in expansive job crafting (JC) behaviors to get more resources to meet their career goals and make better career plans. As a result, this paper aims to investigate how Chinese manufacturing workers perform JC behaviors to translate perceived work stress into more control over their careers in today’s shrinking job market. Drawing on the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, this study thus investigates how employee continuance commitment (CC), as a manifestation of work stress, influences career control that can reflect the sustainability of careers in such a turbulent time and how the three dimensions of employees’ JC (i.e., increasing structural job resources, increasing social job resources, and increasing challenging job demands) mediate the CC‒career control relationship, respectively. A time-lagged survey was carried out with a sample of 476 Chinese production workers. The results show that crafting jobs is instrumental in translating the degree of CC that embodies the level of work stress to the degree of career sustainability during the digital transformation of Chinese manufacturing. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications. Limitations and their implications for future studies are also reviewed.
Highlights
Along with the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and artificial intelligence (AI), China’s manufacturing sector has undergone a radical transformation toward total digitalization and automation replacing human workers
A review of literature has examined the positive impact of employees’ commitment toward organizations upon their career-related outcomes, such as career satisfaction, career control, and career development [9,23,24], because committed employees are often devoted to their work and get more job-related resources. Following this line of thought, based on the job demand-resource (JD-R) framework [5] we further argue that, facing the ever-rising complexity of job demands during China’s manufacturing digitalization, production workers with high continuance commitment (CC) have a sense of fear due to career development stagnation in such a turbulent, highly uncertain environment
CC was positively associated with increasing structural job resources (r = 0.518, p < 0.01), increasing social job resources (r = 0.597, p < 0.001), and increasing challenging job demands (r = 0.591, p < 0.01), while all the three dimensions of job crafting (JC) above were highly correlated with career control (r = 0.685, r = 0.681, and r = 0.678, p < 0.01)
Summary
Along with the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and artificial intelligence (AI), China’s manufacturing sector has undergone a radical transformation toward total digitalization and automation replacing human workers. As a matter of fact, Chinese production workers have been encountering severe employment challenges and work stress owing to the prevalence of ICTs and smart machines; apart from less-skilled occupations, more and more managerial and technical jobs are disappearing. The motivation behind this research is to gain a better of understanding of this newly emergent, digital-technology-driven phenomenon, as it has fundamentally changed the career landscape of Chinese manufacturing. Without doubt, this recent wave of unemployment has led to considerable concerns about rising occupational anxiety among manufacturing workers, as they have perceived the lack of career alternatives in the labor market [2,3,4].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
