مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد شغل سازی و روابط آن با تناسب و شایستگی فرد ( الزویر )

مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The organization of work has important implications for people’s life and psychological health as work can provide resources to survive, access to relational connections, and the experience of control over one’s life (Blustein, 2008). Work that is experienced as motivating and meaningful by employees is found to also contribute to the organization’s core (Steger, Dik, & Duffy, 2012). Not surprisingly, there is a robust knowledge base available for managers in order to design jobs that are likely to be experienced as motivating and meaningful by the workers (Humphrey, Nahrgang, & Morgeson, 2007). At the same time, scholars call attention to the fact that the job design is not only influenced by managers but by employees as well (Fuller, Marler, & Hester, 2006; Staw & Boettger, 1990). Changes in the way work is structured and performed nowadays call for workers who take agency in influencing their work characteristics (Strauss & Parker, 2014). Generally speaking, proactive person–environment fit behaviors (Parker & Collins, 2010) may be key for individual workers to match their needs and abilities with the opportunities and demands of the work environment. The self-initiated changes that employees make in the design of their job are referred to as job crafting behaviors (Tims & Bakker, 2010; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

Especially in the context of the changing nature of work, job crafting may be important. For example, when organizations restructure by means of outsourcing production processes or when they embrace the concept of new ways of working and allow employees to work from other places than the office, these changes are likely to affect the work environment. Meaningful work processes may be eliminated and also meaningful social connections may be less likely to occur without effort. Work environments that are characterized by such changes may become detrimental to employees’ needs, values, and sense of organizational well-being (Sarros, Tanewski, Winter, Santora, & Densten, 2002). However, when employees engage in job crafting, they can create ways to regain meaning in their work by changing tasks or creating opportunities for interpersonal contact. The goal of the present study is to examine whether job crafting indeed relates to meaningfulness, through person–job fit.

The present study contributes to the existing literature in several important ways. First, although Wrzesniewski and colleagues (Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010;Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) proposed meaningfulness as an important reason for job crafting, research has mainly focused on other (albeit important) job crafting outcomes such as employee work engagement, job performance, and organizational commitment (e.g., Leana, Appelbaum, & Shevchuk, 2009; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013). This means that the way job crafting affects meaningfulness remains untested while it is important to see whether employees who take the initiative to change their work characteristics are indeed increasing the meaningfulness of their work (Kira & Balkin, 2014). Therefore, we empirically test the assumption of Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s (2001) job crafting model that job crafting is a proactive strategy to make work more meaningful.