What is Job Crafting? And why is it important?

We are all job crafters. Being an aware job crafter significantly boosts well-being, engagement and job performance.

What is job crafting?

Job crafting refers to behaviors people actively perform to find meaning in work or to reduce stress and burnout.

A great example comes from Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) who shared their observations about job crafting in an American hospital. Some members of the cleaning team determined that their job was to contribute to patients’ recovery by keeping the hospital hygienic. They decided that they were healers and, by re-framing the scope of their work, they transformed the content of their job. Keeping the hospital sanitized became instrumental for patients to get better faster. Also sharing small act of kindness with patients - and their families - grew to be a part of their job and contributed to patients’ recovery by creating a positive environment within the hospital. By re-framing the meaning of their work from cleaning to healing, they transformed their work from a set of different tasks to a meaningful whole where each task was functional to a final purpose (eg. from cleaning the floor/rooms/bathrooms/non interacting with patients to keeping patient healthy by sanitizing the hospital and sharing care).

Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001, p. 179) coined the definition of job crafting as ‘‘the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work.’’. In this story, the healers/cleaners made sense of their work environment and behaved in accordance with their own preferences, values, skills, but also motives and passions. According to the authors the job crafting construct is divided into three dimensions: task, relational and cognitive crafting. Task crafting relates to the changes in the individual tasks (e.g. reshaping, adding, and dropping tasks). Relational crafting focuses on expanding or reducing contacts within the organization and shaping the relational boundaries of the work. Cognitive crafting refers to modifying the perception of the content of the job. These three dimensions are related, but not mutually exclusive, and might be expressed in different time frames.

Why people do craft their jobs?

Because people want to feel better at work, form positive organizational identities (Wrzesniewski, LoBuglio, Dutton, & Berg, 2013) or at least reduce the level of stress. The employee is the initiator and the change agent who drives the job crafting process which is motivated by: (i) the need for control over job and work meaning, (ii) the need for a positive self-image, and (iii) the need for human connections with others. These are powerful motivations which are shared across cultures.

Why is job crafting important for organisations ?

From an organizational perspective, job crafting may occur with or without a supervisor’s knowledge and it can be proactive or adaptive. In other words, employees can proactively change a work situation or also withdraw from the stressors and adapt to their environment limiting their contribution. In order to craft a job, it is necessary to prepare the groundwork for proactive behavior by adapting and managing the existing context. This is because organizational structural restrictions, occupational status, organizational norms, as well as personal economic constraints, may affect employees’ ability to job craft (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2013; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Factors such as supportive supervision, job autonomy (J. Li, Sekiguchi, & Qi, 2014) and organizational citizenship behavior (Slemp & Vella-Brodrick, 2013b) have been found to be positively facilitating job crafting.

Job crafting is important because it is related to positive performance (Ghitulescu, 2007; Tims et al., 2012), lower absenteeism (Ghitulescu, 2007), job attachment, well-being (Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013) and meaning of work (Wrzesniewski et al., 2013). Another important outcome of job crafting is engagement. In a meta-analysis covering 60 studies and a cumulative sample size of more than 20,000 surveys, Rudolph et al. (2017) established that job crafting does positively and strongly correlate to work engagement.

We are all job crafters. Raising job crafting's awareness can dramatically impact employees' well-being, engagement and performance.