مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

۱٫۱٫ Job crafting and employee well-being Employee well-being can be perceived as a function of various job resources and job demands, in which job resources spark a positive, motivational process while buffering the negative effects of job demands (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001). Work engagement involves high levels of job resources that are balanced with reasonably high job demands (Bakker, Hakanen, Demerouti, & Xanthopoulou, 2007). Hence, the more demanding a job, the more resources are needed to sustain work engagement. In contrast, job boredom has been associated with a lack of both job resources and job demands (Reijseger et al., 2013).

Two types of job demands have been distinguished: Whereas hindrance demands (e.g. role conflict, role ambiguity, red tape and hassles) may hamper well-being, challenge demands (e.g. high workload, time pressure, job responsibility) may foster work engagement (Crawford, LePine, & Rich, 2010) and protect employees from job boredom (van Tilburg & Igou, 2012). According to COR theory, employees may proactively cope with potential threats to their well-being, before problems actually arise (Hobfoll, 2001). We argue that job crafting can thus be considered proactive coping behavior, as employees anticipate potential threats to their well-being and actively prevent future experiences of job boredom from emerging.

So far, research has associated job crafting with, for example, higher work engagement (Vogt, Hakanen, Brauchli, Jenny, & Bauer, 2016; Tims et al., 2012; Petrou, Demerouti, Peeters, Schaufeli, & Hetland, 2012; Bakker, Albrecht, & Leiter, 2011), as well as colleague-rated in-role performance (Bakker, Tims, & Derks, 2012). In addition to increasing employees’ own work engagement, a recent study showed that job crafting may also increase colleagues’ job crafting and consequently, colleagues’ work engagement (Bakker, Rodríguez-Muñoz, & Vergel, 2016). However, research on the well-being effects of job crafting other than work engagement has been scarce. In addition, studies have typically examined the effects of job crafting as a unitary concept, although there are many ways to make tasks, job context or social encounters at work more meaningful (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Tims et al. (2012) distinguish between three types of job crafting behaviors; (1) increasing structural resources e.g. task variety, opportunities to develop new skills or work processes, autonomy); (2) increasing social resources (e.g. social support, supervisory coaching, feedback); and (3) seeking challenges (e.g. getting involved in new projects, performing additional tasks, volunteering to test new tools or applications). Moreover, longitudinal studies on job crafting using full panel design are still rare (Vogt et al., 2016).