Abstract
The actions that individuals take to proactively craft their jobs are important to help create more meaningful and personally enriching work experiences. But do these proactive behaviors have implications beyond working life? Inspired by the suggestion that individuals aim for a meaningful life we examine whether on days when individuals craft their jobs, they are more likely to craft non-work activities. It also seems likely that characteristics of the home environment moderate these cross-domain relationships. We suggest that crafting crosses domains particularly when individuals gain resources through high autonomy and high workload at home. We partly supported our model through a daily diary study, in which 139 service sector employees from six European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UK) reported their experiences twice a day for five consecutive workdays. Home autonomy and home workload strengthened the positive relationship between seeking resources at work and at home. Moreover, home autonomy strengthened the positive association between seeking challenges at work and at home, and the negative relation between reducing demands at work and at home. These findings suggest that the beneficial implications of job crafting transcend life boundaries thereby providing advice for how individuals can experience greater meaning in their lives.
Highlights
Nowadays many organizations expect people to shape and manage their own jobs (Grant and Parker, 2009)
Drawing from Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory and the propositions set out by Parker et al (2010), we focus on home workload and home autonomy as they create the conditions to motivate individuals to craft their environment
Inspired by the idea that individuals aim for a meaningful life and do not voluntarily make a life domain less stimulating (Albrecht, 2013), we suggest that having autonomy to spend non-work time as one wishes will make individuals less inclined to transfer reduction-oriented crafting from their work into the home domain
Summary
Nowadays many organizations expect people to shape and manage their own jobs (Grant and Parker, 2009). The goal of this study is to examine whether the use of daily job crafting strategies is linked to the use of crafting strategies at home during non-work time, and whether daily workload and autonomy at home represent contingency factors that moderate the extent to which crafting behavior transcends life domains. To reach this goal we combine extant theory on inter-role relationships (i.e. the mechanisms of spillover and compensation) with literature on proactivity and job crafting to explain how behavior may be transferred from the work to the home domain. These advantages are relevant to our study as we examine behavior and its situational determinants within the context that they occur
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