| Employees’ health and performance are positively related to organizational productivity (Grossmeier et al., 2016; Huselid, 1995; Jiang et al., 2012). However, due to unhealthy employees, there are productivity related losses of up to $168 billion (Hassard et al., 2018). Accordingly, keeping employees healthy and productive is of high strategic value for organizations. Top-down leadership and employees’ bottom-up job crafting are important drivers of employees’ health and performance (Rudolph et al., 2017; Skakon et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2011). The goal of this study is to integrate both perspectives. We develop and test a model where leadership has an impact on health and performance through employees’ job crafting. Through job crafting, employees are proactively aligning their work better with their abilities, needs, and preferences (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001). In the job demands-resources ( JD-R) job crafting model, employees’ job crafting is aimed at changing job characteristics (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017; Tims et al., 2012). In this study, we test an extended version of the JD-R job crafting model, which differentiates promotion-focused job crafting (i.e. employees try to approach motivating job characteristics through increasing job resources or challenging job demands) from prevention-focused job crafting (i.e. employees try to avoid strenuous job characteristics through decreasing hindering job demands) (Bruning and Campion, 2018; Lichtenthaler and Fischbach, 2016a). Research shows that promotion-focused job crafting is positively and prevention-focused job crafting is negatively related to health and performance (Rudolph et al., 2017). To ensure employees’ health and performance leaders need to facilitate promotion-focused job crafting and attenuate prevention-focused job crafting. Leadership (e.g. servant leadership) is positively related to promotion-focused job crafting (Bavik et al., 2017; Gordon et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2017). With regard to prevention-focused job crafting, results are mixed. For example, directive leadership is positively related to prevention-focused job crafting (Esteves and Lopes, 2017), whereas transformational leadership has no impact on prevention-focused job crafting (Wang et al., 2017). In this study, we argue that employee-oriented leadership reduces employees’ necessity for prevention-focused job crafting because employee-oriented leadership is negatively related to hindering job demands (Schaufeli, 2015; Tuckey et al., 2012). We expect to contribute with this study to the literatures on job crafting, leadership, and employee health and performance by explicating intervening processes in these relationships. We integrate the effects of top-down leadership and employees’ bottom-up job crafting on employee health and performance. We add to research on the extended JD-R job crafting model (Bruning and Campion, 2018; Lichtenthaler and Fischbach, 2016a), which proposes that promotion- and prevention-focused job crafting have different relationships with antecedents (i.e. leadership) and outcomes (i.e. health and performance). We add to the literature on leadership as an antecedent of job crafting (Rudolph et al., 2017). Finally, we add to the literature on performance by considering the relationships of promotion- and prevention-focused job crafting with different performance facets (i.e. task, adaptive, and proactive performance) (Griffin et al., 2007). Summarizing, we expect that employee-oriented leadership is positively related to employees’ health and performance through facilitating promotion-focused job crafting and reducing prevention-focused job crafting. |
