How to Sustain Proactivity? The Dynamic Relationship Between Job Performance and Job Crafting

Abstract

In increasingly uncertain workplaces, organizations expect employees to proactively initiate change and sustain their efforts in proactivity. Nevertheless, it is challenging for employees to sustain proactivity and little is known about how to sustain their proactive efforts. Drawing on the theory of self-regulation, we seek to advance the understanding towards temporal changes of proactivity (i.e., job crafting), via a novel perspective of dynamic performance-driven process. Conducting a field study with six waves of multi-source data (N = 338), we found that job performance trajectory acted as an important predictor of job crafting trajectory, controlling for the initial level of job performance and proactive personality. Moreover, job self-efficacy change acted as an essential mediating mechanism underlying this relationship. Further, employees’ attachment to the organization (i.e., intention to stay) moderated the effect of job performance trajectory on job crafting trajectory via job self-efficacy change, such that the mediating effect of self-efficacy change was stronger when employees were more attached to their organizations. Our study shed new light on understanding the dynamics of both performance and proactivity.