Job Crafting : a Distinct Form of Proactive Employee Behavior

Abstract

Employees do not always act like puppets in the organizational masterplan but shape their work environments according to individual strengths, needs, and interests. Job crafting refers to proactive employee behaviors that involve shifting work boundaries in terms of tasks, relations, and cognitions about their jobs, in order to increase their overall job experience and meaningfulness. The concept of job crafting challenged basic assumptions of previous work design theories and stimulated a plethora of follow-up research efforts aiming to understand today’s dynamics and motivations at work. In a multifaceted and comprehensive effort to contribute to the rapidly expanding literature on job crafting, this cumulative dissertation seeks to pick up four concerns in order to advance the literature in terms of novel theorizing, greater clarity, research domain cross-fertilization, and more robust research designs that potentially allow for causal attributions. To achieve this, CHAPTER 1elaborates the overall the scientific relevance, the goals and intended contribution of this dissertation. CHAPTER 2 develops a novel integrative meta-analytic framework that captures job crafting behaviors from both major conceptualizations and forms distinct and coherent clusters of job crafting. It addresses the research questions Which kinds of job crafting are instrumental in achieving individual well-being and employee performance? (RQ1.1) and How do societal cultural factors, such as individualism or uncertainty avoidance, moderate the relationships between the specific forms of job crafting and individual performance? (RQ1.2). CHAPTER 3 absorbs central aspects of the recruitment literature and employs a multi-study approach to investigate the role of job crafting opportunities in attracting new applicants to the organization. It centers around the research questions: How does offered job crafting affect organizational attraction? (RQ2.1) and What are the underlying mechanisms that link job crafting opportunities to organizational attraction? (RQ2.2). CHAPTER 4 turns to the literature on (entrepreneurial) opportunity evaluation and develops a framework in order to model task crafting decisions. This chapter addresses the research question: When and why do some individuals (and not others) decide to exploit opportunities to engage in task crafting behaviors? (RQ3). CHAPTER 5 illuminates how and when self-sacrificial leadership may differently motivate expansive versus reductive forms of task crafting. It is concerned with the research questions: How does self-sacrificial leadership relate to expansive vs. reductive forms of task crafting? (RQ4.1) and How does prevention focus moderate the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and expansive vs. reductive forms of task crafting? (RQ4.2). CHAPTER 6 discusses and summarizes how the respective research questions have been addressed and the related scientific contributions. With this dissertation, we hope to help the job crafting literature move forward with novel theorizing,…