مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

Job crafting refers to the process by which employees change elements of their jobs and relationships with others to change the meaning of their work and the social environment at work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). The latter authors propose that employees can craft their job using each of three different strategies: employees can craft the amount or type of tasks; they can change their relations with other people (e.g. how often or how long they interact with colleagues and clients); and employees can change their cognitions about their job.

Following a job redesign perspective and using JD-R theory, Tims, Bakker and Derks (2012) proposed an alternative approach of job crafting. These authors conceptualized job crafting as the proactive, bottom-up changes individuals make in their levels of job demands or job resources. Through job crafting, employees can improve the fit between their personal needs and abilities on the one hand and their job characteristics on the other. Tims et al. (2012) propose four job crafting dimensions: increasing social job resources (e.g., seeking social support among colleagues); increasing structural job resources (e.g., creating opportunities to develop oneself at work); increasing challenging job demands (e.g., starting new projects); and / or decreasing hindering job demands (e.g., reducing workload). The bottom-up moulding of job demands and resources initiated by employees themselves plays a substantial role in the most recent version of JD-R theory (Bakker & Demerouti, 2014).

Recent studies revealed that employees who take the initiative themselves to optimize their job demands and job resources in the work environment, facilitate and stimulate their own work engagement. A study by Bakker, Tims and Derks (2012) among 95 dyads of employees working in various organizations revealed that employees’ job crafting behavior was predictive of their work engagement. In addition, a recent longitudinal job crafting study (Tims, Bakker & Derks, 2015) among 288 participants showed similar positive relations between employees’ job crafting behavior and their work engagement.