Job Crafting

The Art of Redesigning a Job

Davide de Gennaro

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781838672225
• eBook ISBN: 9781838672218
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Although most jobs are initially designed by managers, employees also play an important role in this phase through a proactive behavior called 'job crafting'. It describes a bottom-up approach that consists of customizing and modifying structural, relational, and cognitive aspects of one's job to match personal skills, attitudes, and inclinations. The literature on this subject has been developing for over 20 years but requires a recapitulation to bring together different and often disconnected contributions and provide a concise research agenda for scholars wishing to approach the study of these issues.  

This book provides a conceptual framework on job crafting by demonstrating how its practice results in a more meaningful and satisfying work experience. This book is the first to investigate this area of study in such a complete and exhaustive way: it takes a managerial perspective to identify the antecedent and outcome variables of job crafting and suggests behaviors which managers should steer clear from to avoid facing negative and unexpected consequences.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO JOB CRAFTING

1.1. INSIGHTS ON THE PHENOMENON

“Organizational researchers care about what what composes the experience of a job”: with a printing error, an involuntary repetition of a term, it begins a story of 20 years of studies on a theme that would have changed forever the way work is organized. It is 2001, and Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton are proposing an innovative approach concerning organizational behavior in the workplace that is the most popular and the most widely used in the job literature of recent years: it is about “job crafting.”

Until the 1990s, work had been a static concept in which the employee was charged with faithfully following the job description designed and imposed by an employer. Today, on the contrary, organizations expect individuals to be proactive and go beyond the provisions of the job statutes. In an economic, financial, and social environment characterized by extreme dynamism and non-linearity, in which the keywords for organizations are rapid response to change and adaptation to unforeseeable and often ambiguous situations, individuals have to rethink themselves and their tasks as well as the relationships with others in the workplace. This way they find meaning and motivation in what they do and also maintain high individual performance levels that, at the same time, favor organizations in achieving their goals. Try to think, for example, about the impacts that changes and technological innovations are having in the workplace and the repercussions in terms of requests for greater flexibility both for organizations and for individuals.

Grant and Parker (2009) indeed suggested that it is possible (and it is appropriate to add “necessary”) to manage organizations with more flexible jobs than traditional ones, where tasks and roles are modified and developed by employees, allowing them to respond to requests and opportunities in the workplace. This paradigm shift stems from a need and a perception: the nature and structures of work are continually influenced by constant and repeated changes, so establishing top-down organizational practices is not functional in responding to the continuous evolution of working conditions (Demerouti, 2014). For example, the economy has gone from being manufacturing-based to being knowledge-based and, consequently, it has become more ambiguous, dynamic, and complex (Davenport, 2013). This is why scholars have proposed extending the reach of job design theories to a bottom-up approach based on personal proactive initiative namely job crafting, understood as an individual-level job redesign. Job crafting, which stems from a new viewpoint of job redesign, represents a swift and a voluntary adaptation of workers to changes at work, so it is considered a useful strategy for the sustainable development of organizations.

Job crafting captures “the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work” (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001, p. 179). It consists of three proactive individual behaviors that enable workers to manipulate their jobs to fit more to their natural inclinations: (1) physically altering the task boundaries to incorporate one or more additional tasks in one’s job, (2) enhancing the social environment at work by investing in high-quality relationships with coworkers, supervisors, customers, and so forth, and (3) working on the cognitive nature of the job by mentally reframing it in more positive terms.

This theory is then described as the possibility, by workers, to shape and redefine their job through physical, relational, and cognitive modifications. In practice, employees proactively modify the way they view their work, the form or number of activities, and the social interactions with others. For example, a personal trainer behaves in task crafting when he or she prepares individual training programs favoring the preferences of their customers, or when he or she chooses alternative contexts to practice the training (Grant, 2007). Another example is a history teacher, passionate about music, who engage in task crafting by including songs within the study program to carry out his or her profession in an innovative and more challenging way (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2013). An example of relational crafting is the case of a cashier of a supermarket that improves the service offered to his or her customers by involving them in talks and conversations or providing them useful shopping tips (Rafaeli, 1989). Another example of this facet is represented by the case of mechanicals when they share with other workers some anecdotes about previous experience of reparations (Orr, 1996). Finally, the cleaning staff of a hospital may offer an example of cognitive crafting when they attribute to their work a wider and more significant meaning in relation to the contribution they can make to the healing process of patients in the healthcare setting (Ghitulescu, 2007). About this, Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) hypothesized that workers that are employed in hierarchically lower duties engage with more motivation in cognitive processes in order to improve their professional identity; individuals who work as cook, for example, do not believe they are simply people who prepare food, but rather they perceive they are “culinary artists” and behave accordingly to meet their need for challenges, achievement, and self-esteem (Berg, Dutton, Wrzesniewski, & Baker, 2008).

This is an epochal turning point that has not had an easy birth (de Gennaro, Buonocore, & Ferrara, 2017). Indeed, even if it is from the beginning of the last century that research has focused on the behavior of employees at work (Taylor, 1911), that perspective and those studies are in a completely opposite view compared to job crafting theory. Scholars used to propose to model and shape the work activities in a top-down approach in which managers chose the way employees carry out the tasks in organizations: job design theories represented the only way of interpreting the working reality, as a tool for management to define the job profiles of employees (Graen, Novak, & Sommerkamp, 1982; Hackman & Oldham, 1976). Subsequently, scholars of motivational theories took a small step forward and proposed the self-determination theory (SDT; Deci, Eghrari, Patrick, & Leone, 1994; Ryan & Deci, 2000), which identified for individuals a need for freedom and a will to choose for themselves the activities to be performed and carried out. Ryan and Deci proposed three types of needs – of competence, relationships, and autonomy – which determined the motivation of workers in the exercise of their professional activity. Through the theories of these scholars, although they were not framed in a purely work organizational literature, over the years the paradigm of work organization has therefore been reversed.

On the basis of these lines of study, it has come to accept the fact that employees autonomously modify their activities in order to make them more similar to their own characteristics, increasing the well-being and the satisfaction at work: scholars then started to talk about “job crafting” (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) and “job crafters” (that is persons who adopt this type of behavior; Slemp & Vella-Brodrick, 2013; Tims & Bakker, 2010). Job crafting is a technique that refers to the changes put in place by the workers in order to make their job more satisfying and challenging.

Individuals implement job crafting behaviors when tasks or duties are not well specified (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) but not only then, as it will be shown later. By taking advantage of this “lack of norms,” individuals can get the best work performance and motivation in the moment they succeed in modifying the features of their job on the basis of their personal characteristics. Thanks to these behaviors and these modifications, individuals are able to change the organizational routines (von Hippel, 1994) by altering the way of working of individuals and workgroups. An example is the relational modifications implemented by doctors and laboratory technicians in the moment they start using a new machinery in the hospital (Barley, 1986): in this situation they are forced to talk to each other because each one has specific skills and knowledge to be shared. Therefore, this modification does not only generate a change in the duties of individuals but also in the boundaries of the team roles and in the activities of the team members. Therefore, job crafting concerns actions aimed at modifying something in the own job – these actions extend the boundaries of the work in order to include additional tasks that individuals consider interesting or useful – but there is no doubt that these changes can generate a chain reaction toward other people in the workplace.

Compared to the logics of the last century, job crafting is an innovative phenomenon which over the years has been affirmed and consolidated, becoming in all respects a recognized and appreciated work and organizational practice.

1.2. CHARACTERISTICS AND DEFINITIONS OF JOB CRAFTING

Before 2001 scholars only cared about the definitions of a job regardless of the workers who carried it out: these definitions were based on individual variables (Roberson, 1990) such as expectations, values, or other peculiar characteristics of the job and not of the person (Griffin, 1987; Hackman & Oldham, 1980); these represented prospects that minimized the role that employees covered in actively performing a job. This short-sightedness is not surprising: the organizational culture was effectively linked to managerial logics and completely focused on the best way to manage and direct the work of others. A demonstration of this is also the fact that today we still worry a lot about issues related to leadership – with numerous contributions on the subject – with respect to followership: the focus is on those who manage, who controls, and much less on those who actually carries out the operational work. This is the surprise and the innovation of job crafting: a change of perspective that is not fashionable but hides decisive and interesting implications for the organization of work and, it will be seen, for numerous other characteristics of work. Indeed, the lens cannot be placed only on those in charge, but also and above all on those who act. The literature of the last century has been as focused on evaluating the victory of a soccer team only assessing its coach, or worse its manager; although they make an important contribution, at least the value of the team and of the single players is omitted.

The “job crafting” expression was introduced by Wrzesniewski and Dutton in 2001 when they realized employees try to make their job in line with their personal characteristics and that the task boundaries, as well as the relational and cognitive ones, of a job are not always precisely determined. “I don’t go to work without having my say.” “I do not accept passively everything that others propose (impose?) to me.” The job crafting expression was then used to identify the ability to shape, model, and redefine a job, and job crafters are individuals who actively modify the psychological traits of their work activity by altering the task boundaries and the cognitive traits, by changing the way in which they use resources and relational features, and finally by altering the interactions within their work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Job crafters act on these employment variables and so they change tasks, identity, and meaning of their work: in this way jobs’ characteristics differ significantly from those supposed by employers.

Job crafting is an activity that employees spontaneously undertake to meet their needs and preferences in the workplace (Kira, van Eijnatten, & Balkin, 2010). It’s a behavior that requires an adaptation to the challenges and to the constraints imposed by an employer (Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010) and it represents a strategic advantage for employees and for the organization as a whole, although it will be shown that these changes are not always in line with the organizational goals and needs (Van den Heuvel, Demerouti, Bakker, & Schaufeli, 2010).

When employees mobilize resources through job crafting behaviors, they can create a work environment that meets their needs and that is more in line with their abilities (Tims & Bakker, 2010). This means job performance will be better: happy employees are indeed more sensitive to take the opportunities in their working environment, they engage more often in relationships with their colleagues, and they are more optimistic and more confident and these attributes enable better results for the organization (Cropanzano & Wright, 2001). Re-reading these lines seems to have discovered hot water: happy workers work better, it seems trivial. And yet it is clear that the focus on the worker is a really recent phenomenon, which has not had the deserved attention over the years and which is taking hold only in the literature of the last 20 years.

The actions proactively and independently undertaken by employees to model, craft, or redefine the nature of a job are different than the agreement negotiated between an employee and a supervisor in the selection phase, and this is the ratio of job crafting (Hornung, Rousseau, Glaser, Angerer, & Weigl, 2010). It is an inevitable process: due to the disparity of information between the two parties at the time of hiring, very often the lack of data on the methods of work does not allow them to accept with complete awareness on the one hand, and on the other – the candidacy made. Indeed, a worker who expected a different job – not only for activities, relationships, perception, but also other characteristics – will do everything to change that situation; at the same time, but this is another story, even the company could decide to carry out a sort of job crafting by moving the worker from one position to another based on the position for which he or she had been hired.

The job crafting behaviors can generate positive results for individuals implementing them, for the other members of the work group, and for the organization as a whole; in the same way, however, it can generate benefits for the individual and negative consequences for the working group or the organization. These are actions undertaken from a bottom-up approach that generates greater work engagement and higher performance (Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013), and that employers should recognize in order to guide workers behavior toward positive actions (Petrou, Demerouti, Peeters, Schaufeli, & Hetland, 2012). Indeed, Bipp and Demerouti (2015) conducted two studies on job crafting which confirmed how, if job crafting refers to changes in one’s job that are not controlled by employers, it is true, however, that employers indirectly influence the ways of crafting of employees through the way they manage relationships and depending on the personality of individuals. This aspect, however, will be further developed in the following sections of the book.

Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), in the definition of job crafting, have limited the application of this technique to the modifications that employees can perform in their specific work tasks, in relationships with others, and in the cognitive aspect of their job. In recent years, however, this definition has been refined and detailed in a new perspective: job crafting represents the modifications in the characteristics of the physical, organizational, and social aspects of a job in order to balance the job demands and the job resources (job demands-resources (JD-R) model, Bakker, Tims, & Derks, 2012; Petrou et al., 2012; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2012). In practice, the JD-R model assumes that each job position has its own particular characteristics, and these characteristics can be classified into job demands and job resources: job strain develops, regardless of the type of job, when some job demands are high and some job resources are limited (e.g., Crawford, LePine, & Rich, 2010).

In summary, there are two main fields of study which have deepened the behavioral dynamics of job crafting: the job identity model (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) and the JD-R model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Petrou et al., 2012); in recent years, moreover, others have emerged with the aim of creating a bridge between these similar but actually distant theories. The objective of the following paragraphs is to shed light on the similarities and differences between these conceptualizations.

1.2.1. The Job Identity Model

The job identity model is the “original” model, the one born before, the one from which everything started. Following the job identity model (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), job crafting consists of three proactive behaviors adopted by employees in order to make their job more challenging and consistent with their own characteristics: employees (1) alter the boundaries of their job by adding or removing some tasks, (2) improve the social aspect of their work through the relationships with colleagues, supervisors, and customers, and (3) modify the cognitive aspect of their job in order to interpret it in a positive way. Practically, this concept refers to the physical and cognitive changes implemented by the individual in the workplace.

Modifying the task boundaries means altering the form, the scope, and/or the number of activities an individual performs in doing his or her job (e.g., a security guard in a museum who provides information to visitors about the most important sculptures to look at). Changing the relational boundaries means improving the quality and/or the amount of daily interactions that an employee has with colleagues, supervisors, and/or clients at work (e.g., a boss who shows care and compassions toward employees’ private life). Changing the cognitive boundaries means changing the way the job is perceived by the job performer with a greater emphasis on the contribution that the job can provide to organization, customers, and/or social community (e.g., a taxi driver who considers his or her work useful for bringing together distant people who love each other). Therefore, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) have proposed that job crafting is not just about physical changes, but also about cognitive ones, namely job meaning and job identity. This is an interesting aspect to note, since not all subsequent scholars will be in agreement with this part of the definition.

With job crafting, employees actively modify the meaning of their job by shaping activities or relations in order to experience and live their job in a different way (Dik & Duffy, 2009). Rafaeli (1989) studied how different types of workers, such as the cashiers of supermarkets, change the characteristics of their job by defining the level and the style of the service offered and by managing customer interactions (such as ignoring, rejecting, reacting, or involving clients in transactions).

Another interesting aspect of the first line of job crafting research is the impact on other employees, as individuals work in interdependence with other colleagues. An example is the work of nurses that will significantly influence the work of doctors (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001): if nurses pay much attention to all the signs and symptoms of the patients, thanks to their suggestions and tips, the diagnosis and the therapies implemented by doctors can be altered and improved. Still in hospital structures, the cleaning staff of those structures can positively or negatively affect the patients’ moods, and this will also generate an improvement of health services (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

Therefore, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) defined job crafting as any changes an individual makes related to the task and/or relational boundaries of a job. These changes can be physical or cognitive; physical changes refer to changes related to tasks and work relationships, while cognitive changes refer to changing the way one views the performed job. More specifically, task crafting is defined as those job-related changes that result in a different number, scope, or type of job tasks, while relational crafting involves initiatives to change the quality and/or quantity of interactions with others at work. This theoretical perspective on job crafting results in a focus on how job crafting can help individuals reframe the purpose of the job and results in a job that is more meaningful and satisfying for the individual (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

It is clear that this is the basic model of the construct. In the early 2000s, and also later, this has been the most appreciated for conducting qualitative studies (Lazazzara, Tims, & de Gennaro, 2019), perhaps since it allows scholars and practitioners to interpret also the way in which these changes occur and not only the “physical” and concrete consequences. However, a larger line of research on job crafting has overcome this triple classification and has attracted the attention of scholars who have, at least in large part, preferred to change side and follow a new trend based on demands and resources in the workplace: the JD-R model.

1.2.2. The JD-R Model

The most popular theory on job crafting, aside from the already mentioned one of Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), is the JD-R model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Petrou et al., 2012).

Before describing this model it is useful to make an analogy. In Naples there is a term very often used but really difficult to translate, even in the Italian language, that is pezzotto. To give an idea, pezzotto generally means “fake,” “counterf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• About the Author
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction to Job Crafting
• Chapter 2 Historical Background
• Chapter 3 Meta-analyses and Meta-syntheses on Job Crafting
• Chapter 4 Current Research and Future Perspectives
• Chapter 5 Conclusions
• References
• Index