How Having A Calling Leads to Job Crafting

Abstract

This study aims to examine the association between calling and proactive behavior by proposing a moderated mediation model. Drawing from the job crafting perspective, career commitment and job autonomy are identified as the mediator and moderator in the model, respectively. The authors tested the proposed relationships with an SPSS macro that utilizes a sample of 350 employees in a three-wave procedure. Results support all the hypotheses. The findings of the study reveal calling to be significantly associated with employees’ job crafting behavior. The authors conclude that such a process begins with one’s career commitment and is subsequently strengthened by the level of autonomy, thus yielding a pattern of moderated mediation. These findings answer recent calls for an integrative examination of calling in the workplace by demonstrating that career commitment and job autonomy represent key mechanisms in transferring one’s calling into job crafting behavior. As such, this study complements existing literature on the theoretical and practical implications of calling in the fields of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.