Including Managers in the Job Crafting Process: Cognitive Clarity through Motivational Interviewing

Job crafting reflects hands-on, self-initiated proactive behaviors to realign job characteristics with personal needs, goals, skills, and/or preferences. The role of managers in the job crafting process—aside from facilitating or hindering job crafting with their leadership styles—remains underexplored due to the proactive nature of job crafting. However, manager involvement is crucial for effective job redesign. Therefore, in this conceptual paper, we unpack why and how managers can play a more active role in job crafting processes and consequently job redesign. To involve managers successfully in job crafting, we introduce motivational interviewing (MI)—a well-established communication approach that facilitates motivation-focused conversations. We develop a process model that explains how MI-informed manager–employee conversations enable a focus on “what motivates the employee and why,” helping both employees and their managers gain greater cognitive clarity about employee needs. Our paper advances the job crafting literature by presenting ways through which job redesign efforts can be realized—namely, by improving cognitive clarity about employee needs and values, thereby enabling employees to make well-informed job crafting changes. Moreover, as the manager also gains clarity about employee needs and values, their job redesign efforts may also become more successful. We discuss how our process model promotes a new line of research on novel job crafting interventions that can more effectively support sustainable job redesign.