The Impact of Job Crafting and Career Expectations on the Dysfunctional Outcomes of Amotivation

Abstract

The lack of motivation towards an activity also known as amotivation (Gagné et al., 2015) has been found to impact a range of significant employee outcomes, including emotional exhaustion, burnout, and turnover, etc. Nonetheless, the existing organizational behavior scholarship has paid little attention to amotivation as a determining factor of important work behaviors such as workplace deviance and turnover intentions. Given that the latter behaviors tend to co-occur, the aim of this study was to examine their relationship with amotivation and explore the plausible boundary conditions that can attenuate this relationship. We conducted a multi-method study in order to examine the influence of proactive job redesign and career outcome expectations on the link between amotivation, deviance, and turnover intentions. First, our findings offered support for the assertions that amotivation can be antecedent to both workplace deviance and turnover intentions. Second, we found evidence that this link can be negatively impacted by job crafting and career outcome expectations. This paper concludes with a discussion of both the practical and theoretical importance of these findings.