Job Crafting Within its Social Work Environment: Moving From an Individual to a Social Perspective

Yin Man Fong

Research output: PhD ThesisPhD-Thesis - Research and graduation internal

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Abstract

With the rise of the knowledge-based economy, technological advancement, globalization and workplace diversity, the nature of work has changed substantially in the past few decades. Under these dramatic changes, it is often difficult for companies to design jobs that can fit all employees. In light of this challenge, Grant and Parker (2009) drew our attention to the importance of the role of employees in taking the initiative to shape their own job in a bottom-up manner. In this context, the notion of job crafting, defined as employee-initiated changes to one’s job design (Tims et al., 2012; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), has received much attention in recent work design literature. However, so far, job crafting research has treated job crafting as if it takes place in a social vacuum (cf. Tims & Parker, 2020). The goal of this dissertation was to explore how the social context, in this case colleagues and supervisors, perceives and responds to job crafting, and to examine whether supervisor support may empower employee job crafting. The findings of this dissertation demonstrated the importance of considering the social environment when conducting job crafting research. First, this dissertation is the first empirical work to reveal that job crafting can trigger evaluations and reactions from observers and that these reactions can influence job crafting effectiveness. These findings provided a much-needed explanation of why approach crafting was consistently associated with positive individual and organisational outcomes, but avoidance crafting was not associated or even was negatively associated with such outcomes (e.g., Lazazzara et al., 2019; Rudolph et al., 2017), which is currently missing in the literature. Second, this dissertation is the first empirical work to show that there are nonlinear relationships between supervisor support and job crafting. This finding challenges the linear assumption held by previous studies, thus providing an alternative explanation for the inconsistent and contradictory theories found in previous studies that examine the relationship between supervisor support and job crafting. Overall, this dissertation explicitly addressed the social embeddedness of job crafting, revealing how the social environment is affected by and affects job crafting, thereby demonstrating the importance of adopting a social perspective in job crafting research.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationPhD
Awarding Institution
  • Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Khapova, SN, Supervisor
  • Tims, Maria, Co-supervisor
Award date21 Sept 2022
Publication statusPublished - 21 Sept 2022

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