User:MGMT90018 Job Crafting/sandbox

Definition

Job Crafting is an ongoing process whereby employee actions are directed toward changing their work environment including their job affiliations and duties at work. Employees can change how their work can be conducted, how often and with whom they interact at work and how they perceive the meaning and importance of their work. It is a way people can express degrees of freedom in their work, to tailor and shape how they sense the job should be, therefore changing the meaning of the work and their work identity. As proposed by Wrzensiewski (2003), job crafting can involve much complexity, the job crafter can alter the relationship frameworks between other employees while also altering the nature and load of their tasks. It has been demonstrated that the underlying factors that determine successful job crafting are associated with the level of discretionary control the individual has over the job, the difficulty level of the job, and the degree of dependence on other associated parties for task completion.

The concept of job crafting focuses explicitly on an employee’s job redesign, it involves creating or initiating change to the job, as opposed to reacting or responding to change in the job. Job crafting captures what employees do to customise their own jobs in ways that can nurture job commitment, fulfilment as well as promote job engagement, resilience and fluorishing at work. Van den Heuven and colleagues illustrated that job crafting can be a strategic advantage when implementing change management processes. When an employee modifies and restructures tasks and work relationships to better suit their needs, the tasks come to hold more meaning and relevance to them. In response to more meaningful workplace attitudes, employees pursue tasks with greater motivation, resulting in increased work performance.

Job crafting is valued at the individual level. Wrzesniewski (2003) has shown that individual job crafting can increase the level of job satisfaction and job performance, meaning the positive affects of job crafting can therefore impact at an organisational level. However Berg et.al suggests it is possible that job crafting can have a detrimental impacts on the individual, the task and relational borders if the job has no genuine scope for change.

Wrzesniewski and Dutton suggested that job crafting can be done via three different methods:

1. Job crafters can alter their work boundaries by changing the amount and scope of the tasks performed;
2. Job crafters can alter their interpersonal relationships by changing the ways they interact with colleagues; and
3. Job crafters can modify the perception of their jobs.

History

According to Tims et.al (2012) the term ‘job crafting’ was created by Wrzesniewski and Dutton in 2001. However the notion of job crafting had been mentioned 14 years earlier by Kulik, Oldham, and Hackman (1987) when they suggested that workers may, of their own initiative, redesign their jobs with or without involving the management. This statement is in line with the definition of Wrzesniewski and Dutton. Even earlier, in 1971, Hackman and Lawler have developed the Job characteristic theory, which points out the task conditions under which individuals are forecasted to prosper in their work.

Job Characteristic Theory

Job characteristic theory assumes that if an individual want to get the desirable outcomes, the individual must experience all three of the psychology states. First and foremost, the experience of the work must be meaningful. In another words, the person must have a feeling that the work is full of worth, value or importance which is accepted by some system. Besides, the work outcomes make the individual experience personal responsibility. The individual must gain personal accountable from the outcome of the work. Last but not least, the individual must have information of the outcomes of the work, which means the individual must understand in a series process of how the job works. If any of the three states is not shown, motivation and satisfaction will be weak.

Idiosyncratic jobs

The earliest view about that individual could craft their own job was from Miner's discovery in "Idiosyncratic jobs" in 1985. He did a research based on jobs in government's departments and concluded that jobs actually were founded based on people rather than founded in advance. Idiosyncratic jobs are work arrangements between an employee and an employer and these are expected to benefit both parties, for example more flexible work hours and opportunities for development. They contains two parts, one is the employment opportunities generated in the current circumstances which was facilitated by existing jobs, another is the mixing tasks which was tie to the individual workers’ capabilities, interests and priorities.

Idiosyncratic deals

Similar to the concept of the idiosyncratic job, idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) aim to benefiting both employees and the organisation through contractual and individualised job allocation (Hornung, Rousseau & Glaser, 2008. For example, employees can have relative flexible work schedules and more opportunities for future advancement through idiosyncratic deals. They are, however, can be seen as compromises designed by the company for attracting some special important employees. As they not available for all employees at all level, idiosyncratic deals differ in the job crafting’s definition in both content and form.

Roles innovation

The concept of "roles innovation" originated from Katz and Kahn in 1966. The roles innovation is another perspectives on job crafting which means a staff can actively redefine the whole job role through the role’s tasks or practice. Role innovation can be started once the role in it's current state is not suited to adequately solve problems that are faced. Staffs can have different degrees of participate in shaping their role. Further, professionals can be classified into three types of roles in their career: firstly a custodian, is one who works to maintain current norms. Secondly, content innovation individuals will not satisfy with the existent knowledge and attempt to redefine it. Finally, role innovators refuse the current standards and are focus on the professional role in the changing world.

Tims and Bakker (2010) defined role innovation as the action of employees to redefine the role in an innovative way when they notice an issue in the definition of the work role, and the role innovation is enhanced when the processes of socialisation reinforce the person to engage in it.

Voice

Voice is defined as the "non-required behaviour that emphasises expression of constructive change with the intent to improve rather than merely criticize" (LePine & Van Dyne, 1998, p.109). It has different forms, for example, suggesting more effective ways of working within organisations. It is suggested that voice is especially important for companies in which change and creativity are required for them to survive. Thus, companies tend to benefit from listening to employees' voice, while employees do not necessarily gain benefits.

Personal Initiative

The theory of Personal Initiative is defined as the employee's voluntary starting behavior that is concurrent with the long-term centralized organizational missions, which are goal targeted, action directed and persistently confronting with difficulties. Sometimes, these actions may go beyond the requirement of individual at work and the working environment will trigger personal initiatives, which will consequently directed toward work and organization problems. As mentioned above, Role innovation, Voice, Idiosyncratic jobs and the personal initiative are generally classified into active performance concepts since these theories illustrate people's capability of go beyond their attributed tasks to exploit their individual goals and solve issues in a standing perspective. An argument raises that employees may gaining benefits from the positive outcomes generated to the company, though the concepts are not necessarily focusing on these individual products. Employees may make active changes in their job design for the sake of enhancing benefits for individuals. They may change their job designs via choosing tasks and missions, negotiating various job duties and assigning meanings to their specific jobs. Additionally, job crafting has been presumed as a method of restructing the job personally so as to stimulate individual outcomes in the first place.

Other Perspectives On Job Crafting

Many researchers examined how individuals shape their jobs across different research stream in organisation theory. They adopt many conceptual approaches to communicate the view of these active, initiative behaviors as performance are better than expected in the role and rewarded. These behaviours are significant important factors of organisational success.They have been defined in a variety of ways, such as organisational citizenship behaviour, and prosocial organisational behaviour, to contextual performance, and organisational spontaneity.

Wrzesniewski et.al. (2013) characterised three different archetypal types of job crafters, namely, the alignment crafter, the aspirational crafter and the accidental crafter. Alignment crafters endeavor to find a positive work meaning or establish a positive work identity through job crafting, meaning they engage in job crafting to fix a discrepancy between their current job and its implications for their work meaning or identity and what they want and expect their work meaning or identity to be. Aspirational crafters take initiative to craft their job in order to develop their work and self into a desired future state that they do not currently experience. Accidental crafters do job crafting unintentionally, for instance they may by chance discover a positive meaning or identity through job crafting.

Latest researches on Job Crafting

Study 1

Petrou et. al did a research in 2012, studying on job crafting on daily basis. This research is quite original in the sense that the researchers put their focus on the demanding aspects of the job employees craft on a daily basis rather than on a general level as earlier researches did. In terms of methodology, the researchers asked the participatory employees to keep a diary of their daily performance in the job and made a detailed analysis based on that. They drew on the job demands-resources (JD-R)model and found out a 3-factor level structure for job crafting. They figured out a positive correlation between day-level work pressure, autonomy and seeking resources, negative relationship between day-level pressure, autonomy and reducing demands. In addition, they found day-level seeking challenges has a positive relationship with day-level work engagement, while day-level reducing demands has a negative correlation with day-level work engagement.

Tims et.al (2013) expanded the present study of job crafting from individual-level to the team-level. They hypothesised that the team job crafting also has a positive influence positive on team performance when team work are engaged. And the hypotheses have been largely supported by the results. Therefore, it is concluded that job crafting can not only improve individual performance but also the whole team’s achievement.

Study 2

A study in 2013 examined the relationships among job crafting, Person-job fit and job engagement shows that job engagement is related to individual crafting and collaborative crafting. Inside which relationship, Person-job fit was proved to play a mediating role.

Background The researchers found that prior studies only analysis how the within-person and between-person job engagement relate to each other and to job crafting, but no further information indicating how job crafting affect engagement. Then they analyzed P-J fit and focus on hotel-service industry.

Research hypotheses According to Kristof-Brown et al. (2005), Person-job fit is the employee characteristics and job characteristics’ relationship. P-J fit plays a critical role for organizational effectiveness. Previous studies found that collaborative job crafting has a positive effect on employees’ sustainable work abilities and job crafting and P-j fit might have positive relations (Kira et al. 2010). Therefore, first two hypotheses are as follows: H1a: Individual job crafting is positively related to P-J fit. H1b: Collaborative job crafting is positively related to P-J fit.

Job engagement refers to “the simultaneous employment and expression of a person's ‘preferred self’ in task behaviors that promote connections to work and to others, personal presence (physical, cognitive, and emotional) and active, full performances” (Kahn, 1990, p.700). Prior researches found evidence to support that P-J fit has a positive effect on job engagement (Babakus et al., 2011). Therefore, the second hypothesis is: H2: P-J fit is positively related to job engagement.

In order to examine the mediating function of P-J fit, researchers proposed the following hypotheses: H3a: P-J fit mediates the relationship between individual crafting and job engagement. H3b: P-J fit mediates the relationship between collaborative crafting and job engagement.

For front-line hotel employees, the individual nature of job indicates that the influence of individual crafting on job engagement through P-J fit may be higher than that of collaborative crafting. Therefore, the fourth hypothesis is: H4: The indirect effect of individual crafting on job engagement through P-J fit is stronger than the indirect effect of collaborative crafting.

Research method Data were collected from 25 international hotels in Taiwan by handing out questionnaires to 550 employees. After eliminating 54 invalid returns from the returned 300 respondents, 246 useful questionnaires are used. Non-response bias was tested and the results indicated there are no differences in gender (χ2 = 1.15, p > .05), age (χ2 = 1.16, p > .05), education (χ2 = 3.77, p > .05), marital status (χ2 = 2.58, p > .05), and organizational tenure (χ2 = 6.59, p > .05), implying a low likelihood of non-response bias.

All results were using scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Job crafting was measured using 12 items ,P-J fit was measured using six items, three dimensions including physical engagement (six items), emotional engagement (six items), and cognitive engagement (six items) are used to measure job engagement.

Results 1.The following table shows female employees were 64.6%; 52.8% were less than 29 years old; single were 56.1%; college graduates were 47.6% and 42.3% of respondents had less than 5 years of tenure.

Variable	n	%	Mean	SD
Gender	-	-	0.65	0.48
Male	87	35.4	-	-
Female	159	64.6	-	-
Age	-	-	1.68	0.8
<29	130	52.8	-	-
30-39	64	26	-	-
40 and above	52	21.1	-	-
Marital status	-	-	0.44	0.5
single	138	56.1	-	-
married	108	43.9	-	-
Education	-	-	3.18	1.00
junior	11	4.5	-	-
high	64	26	-	-
junior college	47	19.1	-	-
college	117	47.6	-	-
graduate	7	2.8	-	-
Organizational tenure	-	-	2.08	1.16
<5 yrs	104	42.3	-	-
<10 yrs	58	23.6	-	-
<15 yrs	57	23.2	-	-
<20 yrs	14	5.7	-	-
20 and above	13	5.3	-	-

Demographic characteristic profile of respondents (N = 246). A: 0 = male; 1 = female. B: 1 = less than 29 years old; 2 = 30–39; 3 = 40 and over;C: 0 = single; 1 = married.D: 1 = Junior high school; 2 = high school; 3 = junior college; 4 = college degree; 5 = graduate degree.E:1 = less than 5; 2 = less than 10 year; 3 = less than 15 year; 4 = less than 20 year; 5 = 20 years and over.

2.This result revealed multiple factors with eigenvalues greater than 1. Following table shows the measures adopted were valid and internally consistent. Besides, Zero-order correlations among variables are presented.

Variable	Mean	SD	AVE	1	2	3	4
Individual crafting	3.87	0.65	0.62	o.89	-	-	-
Collaborative crafting	3.66	0.7	0.69	0.4	0.9	-	-
P-J fit	3.45	0.74	0.7	0.33	0.35	0.89	-
Job engagement	3.77	0.56	0.73	0.43	0.31	0.52	0.95
Means, standard deviations and correlations of all variables Notes: The values on the diagonal are Cronbach alphas. p < .01.

3. Hypothesis testing According to the following table, Hypotheses 1a and b are supported as paths from individual crafting to P-J fit and from collaborative crafting to P-J fit are significant. Hypothesis 2 is supported by the positive relationship between P-J fit and job engagement. Hypotheses 3a and b were supported because P-J fit’s variables were 20% while 42% for job engagement.

Models	χ2 (df)	RMR	SRMR	CFI	IFI	Comparisons
Hypothesized: Model 1	1514.68 (398)	0.06	0.10	0.83	0.83	-
Alternative model 2a	1507.56 (397)	0.06	0.09	0.83	0.83	Model 2 compared to model 1
Alternative model 3b	1487.66 (397)	0.04	0.07	0.83	0.83	Model 3 compared to model 1
Alternative model 4c	1486.91 (396)	0.05	0.08	0.83	0.83	Model 4 compared to model 3
Structural equation model comparisons. a. Direct path from collaborative crafting to job engagement. b. Direct path from individual crafting to job engagement. c. Direct paths from individual crafting and collaborative crafting to job engagement.

Conclusion 1. Both individual and collaborative job crafting are positively related to job engagement. 2. P-J fit is a mediator between job crafting and job engagement. 3. The indirect effect of individual job crafting on job engagement through P-J fit is stronger than that of collaborative job crafting

Theories

Individual job crafting and collaborative job crafting

Academic researchers have shown that job crafting is directly linked to need satisfaction, self-efficacy, motivational, organisational citizenship behaviour as well as goal setting frameworks. Job crafting can be classified into two categories: individual job crafting and collaborative job crafting. Individual job crafting occurs when a person takes self-initiative and plays an active role in changing the boundaries of their job and shaping the actual work practices. Collaborative job crafting refers to "employees who jointly make an effort to determine how to change the task boundaries to fulfil their shared work goals".

In addition, the job crafting motivation generally comes from three individual needs. Firstly, to avoid estrangement from work, employees participate in job crafting to take their control on assigned tasks and jobs. Secondly, organization staffs are encouraged to build a energetic image of themselves in the workplace. Thirdly, job crafting enables employees to satisfy their basic demands of having interpersonal communication with others in the society.

Main theories for job crafting by Collective Actors

In group or collective arrangements, staffs may have many chances to craft work as a part of the work is complete off the cuff. There are mainly three areas of research about how collectives craft work.

Firstly, Lave and Wenger (1991) published their work on "communities of practice", which provided helpful views on how people play job practices in a group, on the basis of rich set of ethnographic data of people from some occupations. This context suggests that it is important to embody true on learning and our conceptualization of the process of learning. This learning is a situated activity in a social context.To elaborate on that, Tims, Bakker, Derks & Rhenen's (2013) study expanded the individual dimension of job crafting to the collective level by examining the correlation between collective job crafting and team achievement through engaging participants to undertake activities. Results demonstrated that a team with team job crafting behavior was likely to lead to individual job crafting, but not the other way around. Simultaneously, work achievement collectively was associated with work achievement individually. The implication is that although employees could differentiate between their individual behaviors and that of the team, team norms and consensus could act as justification of individual job crafting. Meanwhile, it is also necessary to reflect more closely on the nature of social learning and our conceptualisation of the learning process.

Secondly, Gersick & Hackman (1990) in their research examined "groups routines" in social psychology, which addedto our understanding a fresh dimension of how people in group act to adjust routines, field evidence and building on experimental. Shaping group routines implies that team members collectively determine job resources necessary for the accomplishment of their tasks, and collectively safeguard the mobility of these resources. This form of team job crafting is also a combined effort to challenge job demands.

Finally, Hutchins (1991) published his work on "organisational improvisation", which provided insights into how action emerges in groups and organisations. Additionally, the predominant use of team in business organizations makes it easier for employees to undertake and succeed in team tasks. In this sense, team members often exchange ideas and expertise during team tasks. According to LePine, Hollenbeck, Ilgen, & Hedlund (1997), this interconnection, to a large extent, appears to impact on personal task performance, in that collective job crafting could determine how employees bring out changes and achieve common work goals. The proposition is that, especially in business settings where employees are assigned to work collaboratively, collective job crafting could increase interpersonal trust and team bound.

Task revision

Counter-role behaviour is kind of organization’s value once job roles are not specified or once job practices are incorrect. In 1990, task revision was present, which can be seen as counter-role behavior’s form that it concludes resisting force to the certain working procedures errors, to a dysfunctional role expectation, or to incorrect job descriptions. Since task revision few happenes in work placements and is mostly undervalued by organisations, an employee should truly see the actions against the standards before conducting task revision.

Theoretically, it would seem that individuals might have great difficulty revising tasks in organisations. The problem stems from the fact that most control systems are devoted to ensuring dependable work behaviour structured according to the status quo, not change. For example, symbols of authority, rules, and penalties function to produce behaviour modelled after those in power and their preferred modes of behaviour. Monetary rewards and promotion systems likewise increase adherence to what is currently defined as correct or successful performance. And even goal setting, generally thought to be the most reliable technique for improving performance, may simply increase behavior in the prescribed direction. That is, there's an increase in the targeted behavior when specific goals are set and it may come at the expense of more innovative actions. Thus, if task revision entails going around a job description or role expectations, it may be behavior with a low base rate.

Job crafting

According to Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), job crafting, both at the general and day level, consists of three dimensions: seeking resources, seeking challenges, and reducing demands. Seeking resources includes behaviours such as asking advice or feedback on job performance, or looking for learning opportunities. The second dimension, seeking challenges includes looking for new tasks or more responsibilities at work after finishing one’s job. Finally, reducing demands includes reducing one's workload and time pressure or minimising the emotionally, mentally, or physically demanding job aspects. The reasons or motivation for job crafting are: a) the need for personal control over one’s job to avoid alienation from the work; b) to build a positive self-image in work, and; c) the need for relationships with others.

Courageous behaviour

Courageous behaviour explained by Howard Harris is an executive virtue with the will for the employees and the good methods for the employers train their employees make effective decisions. The implication for putting Courageous behaviour in to employees’ training is directed toward some good results for organisations. In 2002, Worline, Wrzesniewski,and Rafaeli presented a more extreme form of job crafting in their work about courageous behavior, which makes a breakthrough of organizational conventions, standards and scripts, for the purposes to enhance performance of organizational. This type gives the actor risks to some extent that determine to work on this behavior. Once the actor does not necessarily involve in behavior, it also include the freedom to choose which can ensure the circumstance is correctly evaluated and the behavior is meaningful.

Job crafting at different ranks

According to empirical study by Berg, Wrzesniewski and Dutton, when employees adapt their work when responding to challenges they perceive in the work, their adaptive efforts depend on rankings in the organization. This study shows that employees from higher ranking tend to describe the obstacles in job crafting within their own expectations. Lower ranking employees tend to describe their challenges within their prescribed jobs and colleagues’ expectations of them.

The higher-rank employees means that employees in the higher levels of power and freedom to act and influence. Employees from low rankings normally have less formal power and freedom compared with higher-rank employees. This study chose 20 employees from a manufacturing firm that had 400 employees and the company was a main company in its industry and 13 employees from a non-profit organization that had 17 female employees. The selection was based on the principle that each selected employees belonged to significant higher level or lower level. This study developed an interview protocol to be used as a framework when having conversations with all selected employees, to get data about how employees recognize their perceptions of job crafting and their experiences with job crafting.

Proactive process

By analysing the data, they first identified six kinds of proactive job crafting referred by all employees. Under Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s (2001) theories of job crafting framework, the six forms of proactive job crafting efforts are stated below in the table.

Change the tasks	Changing the scope or nature of tasks
	Having extra tasks
Change the relationships	Changing the extent or nature of relationships
	Having extra relationships
Changing Cognitive	Changing the type or nature of tasks or relationships included in one’s job
	Changing perception of job as a valuable whole that has a good impact on others, not a collection of separate tasks

Results showed that employee ranking didn’t impact proactive efforts described by employees. What’s more their results provide evidence that these three forms of job crafting are not isolated, rather are interrelated with each other. Also one particular form of job crafting can be triggered by another form. Results also showed that employee ranking didn’t impact proactive efforts described by employees.

Challenges perceived in job crafting

Their findings also identified two types of challenges participants described in job crafting. Participants of higher-ranking employee and lower-ranking employee both expressed that the challenges they met are from the obligations associated with their job developments and the need to ask others to adapt to their job crafting. More details about these two challenges are summarized in the table below.

Difficulties from obligations related with job design	The difficulty of having a job development with only normal end goals (higher-rank)
	The difficulty of having a job development with exact means and ends (lower-rank)
Difficulties from letting others to adapt with job crafting	The difficulty of not encroaching on others (higher-rank)
	The difficulty of formal power shortage (lower-rank)

However employees’ ranking did have effect on how employees described the challenges they met in job crafting and how the adaptive efforts help to overcome the challenges. As table showed above, the high-ranking employee usually thought that the challenges are from their anticipation of how they and colleagues should use time at work, but the low-ranking employees considered that challenges are from others who imposed expectations on them. Employees from both ranking talked about how these challenges interrelated and reinforced with each other. After comparing the difference between these two groups of employees, the author thought that the difference of perceived challenges might influence the adaptive efforts by employees from different rankings.

Adaptive process

The author first differentiates proactive job crafting and adaptive job crafting. Proactive job crafting normally includes efforts as designing changes to the task, relationships and cognitive boundaries of their works. Adaptive job crafting normally includes efforts as problem solving in response to the difficulties they perceived (Pulakos et al., 2000). They also define adaptive efforts as cognitive or behavioral moves for the perceived challenges. Participants’ responses about their adaptive efforts of job crafting are stated below in the table.

High-ranking employees	Focusing on endowed chance to job craft
	Changing anticipations of potential to job craft
	Acting outside task boundaries to job craft
low-ranking employees	Conducting advantages to find and hold opportunities to job craft
	Choosing specific others who can give chance to job craft
	Creating trust to get chance to job craft

These results show that employees from different rankings use different repertories, which include three adaptive moves to deal with difficulties perceived in changing their jobs proactively. The combination of adaptive efforts usually respond to how employees perceive the challenges they met in job crafting. High-ranking employees and low-ranking employees give different ways of adaptive processes. High-ranking employees thought that adaptive efforts make their own expectations change and the efforts worked. But low-ranking employees thought that their adaptive efforts changed others’ expectations on them and create more chance for job crafting.

In all, the proactive job crafting is approximately the same between the two rankings of employees. However, how they perceived the challenges are different. High-ranking employees consider the challenges more from own expectations while low-ranking employees consider it more from external expectations. This difference about perceived challenges impact their way of adaptive job crafting. High-ranking employees tend to fix problem from their own aspects while low-ranking employees tend to do it from external aspects.

Job crafting and positive meaning of work

• The self as a source of work meaning: Rosso and colleagues (2010) identify four main sources of meaning of work. The first one is the employee’s values motivations and beliefs. Most research in this part suggests that it is more meaningful when doing work aligns with employee’s self attributes. Thus, job crafting encourage employee to shape their responsibilities and connections in manners that accept for more expression of their values, motivations, or beliefs which could probably influence positively on the meaning of their work by creating a connection between the self and the work.

• Others as a source of working meaning: The second source encompasses other people including managers, coworkers, leaders communities to which the employee belong and family. Research in this area indicates that employees communicate and contribute to social, community, various groups or individuals in their work will influence their meaning of work. It means that job crafting can have major impact if an employee view the their jobs considering the role that other people play in their work .

• Context as a Source of Work Meaning: The third source is concerning the context of work involving the design of job tasks, the organisational mission, employee’s financial conditions, and the role of non-work aspects, including the national culture that impacts narratives of work. Nevertheless, context may limit job crafting while employees’ contexts may also provide them with resources to use in crafting their jobs to cultivate positive meaning . Task crafting directly changes the work tasks, which has a direct impact on work meaning. Additionally, an employee can also craft areas of the job to assist the organisation focus on activities or causes that the employee believes in deeply, possibly changing the employee’s experience of the mission of the organisations as a result.

• Spirituality as a Source of Work Meaning: The last source of meaning for work identified concerns spiritual life and the awareness of having a sacred or spiritual calling (Rosso et al., 2010). It is found that individuals that structure their job through service or expression of religious or spiritual aims, then their work filled with religious or spiritual meaning which employee consider as significant. E.g., an accountant believes that her occupation was selected by the religious entity in which he believes and that his work is contributed to that entity has advocated to a belief system that creates strong implications for the cognitive crafting of the work. Basically, the work directly services the religious entity, which relates the work to a focus and source of ultimate positive meaning.

Job crafting and positive work identities

Research shows that individuals construct different positive organisational identities through job crafting. The four main organisational identities are listed.

• Job Crafting and a Virtuous Organisational Identity:As Individuals define themselves with qualities that related with good characters and morals to other people within their working identities then the kind characters make their organisational identities positive. We could call this type of positive identity virtuous since the self-attributes are qualities that are allied with virtue or moral character. Employees could use different job crafting methods to create virtuous organisational identity. E.g. an individual could alter his or her job by taking more volunteer jobs that are considered to be moral or virtue.

• Job crafting and esteemed organisational identityAccording to most of the identity related research, an individual want to be considered as significant and worth. The second method that captures a positive organisational identity through job crafting associated with one’s social group evaluate positively on him or her. For example, members could alter their job task or relational boundaries by connecting directly with customers who have positive impression on the organization. They use job crafting to create a more positive organizational identity through collecting feedback that are suggesting that they are doing good things and consequently, they are valued and esteemed people.

• Job Crafting and a Progressive Organisational IdentityThirdly, individuals’ social identities could be dynamic which means the personal identity content changes over time. A progressive identity captures the idea that an individual could see themselves as positively developing and evolving toward a desired or imagined self . E.g. when an employee involved in a program for providing services for elder people. As he routines alter his job task and maintain these behaviour, then he may define himself as a ‘nurse’ when he providing services and help to elder people who need care.

• Job Crafting and a Complementary Organisational IdentityLast but not least, one’s identity could be positively focus on the relationships of different aspects of individual identity. It is suggested that a better compatible ability among various individual roles and social identities have more advantages. For example, Jane is a university professor and she asks her two daughters to attend her lectures or speeches. Her two daughters give comments and add ideas during the public discussions. In this circumstance, Jane experiences a positive power of integration between her role as a mother and social identity as a local university professor.

Antecedents

According to Edwards, 1991, people try to do job crafting since they believe their current job does not fit them very well. Therefore, a person-job fit can be one of the antecedents for job crafting. There are two parts of person-job fit which are demands-abilities fit & needs-supplies fit. Demand-abilities are related to whether the abilities of the employee can meet the demands of the work role. For instance, a math lecturer is required to have a good mathematical skill in order to be a good lecturer. On the other hand, needs-supplies are related to what can the job provide to the employee, whether it matches employee needs and desires or not. Hence, these two aspects will affect on the employee loyalty and behaviour to the employer. A recent longitudinal study by Lu et al. has confirmed that job crafting does increase an individual's engagement with work and this in turn results in an increase in a person-job fit. They suggest that job crafting is more likely to occur in times of job insecurity as employees aim to be seen as a good fit with their jobs and therefore worthy of retention.

As mentioned earlier, job discretion, job difficulty level, job relationships as well as the structural milieu in which the job exists, all motivate employees to undertake job crafting in the terms described below.

Job Discretion - The more discretion or control an individual possess over their job, the more likely job crafting will take place. The logic behind this statement is that when an individual has discretionary powers they have the freedom to pursue the job through several ways. Thus, the level of job crafting is high.

Job Difficulty - In addition, job difficulty and the level of job complexity also influences job crafting in the workplace. As a job gets more complex, employees tend to need more assistance in the process of job completion. This means that employees will experience more learning on the job, resulting in a high level of job crafting. On the side note, complexity of the job will then help the literature to define the techniques of job crafting which is divided into three sections discussed later.

Job Relationships - The interdependence between workers that is attached to a task will negatively impact job crafting. In the light of less control over the task in the means of the way in performing the jobs, the possibility to do job crafting will be hampered along the way due to that constraint.

Tims and Bakker identified the following triggers of job crafting in their studies in 2010:

Autonomy - As Hackman and Oldham (1980) has found in their research, work autonomy plays a key role in motivating employees to make changes in their job design. Workplace autonomy is defined as “the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the employee in scheduling the work and in determining the processes to be used in carrying it out” (p. 79). According to Hornung and Rousseau (2014), being a precondition for job crafting, work autonomy leads to more flexible and proactive work orientation, which motivates workers to take more responsibility and self-initiative at work, and in turn support workplace changes.Autonomy is critical to employee involvement in practice, when talk about a psychologically healthy workplace. Some experts believe that autonomy is made of two aspects: work-life balance and flexibilty. In general, successful enterprises adopt some methods to create the flexibility practices, including flexible scheduling, videoconferencing and telecommunication. Tims and Bakker's research results (2010)indicated that employees can not make change in their jobs when they do not perceive freedom and control over their work in the workplace.

Task Independence - Job crafting is more likely to happen in the workplace when employees are able to perform tasks independently. When employees do not have to rely on each other, it would be easier for them to make work adjustments in order to achieve better outcomes. On the other hand, Tim and Bakker (2010) found that if the success of someone's work has to depend on the success of others', it might be difficult for the person to proactively make changes in the job.

Proactive Personality - People with proactive personalities are more likely to engage in job crafting than those who do not have such characteristics, since they tend to take the initiative in improving unsatisfying working environment, identifying potential opportunities for corporate changes and taking actions to make adjustments (Batman & Crant as cited in Tims & Bakker, 2010). Proactive people tend to change the aspects of their work that might negatively impact the attainment of goals and in doing so are more likely to be effective in their work. Research also suggests that proactive people are more creative and innovative at work, and are more actively involved in organizational changes (Seibert, Kraimer & Crant, 2001).

Motivations for job crafting

There are several main reasons that may arouse in motivation for job crafting. Firstly, employees may be motivated by the need to maintain interest in their job and motivation at work (Wrzesniewski 2001). Secondly, they engaged in job crafting to control over job and meaning of work and create a positive self-image since work is mainly concerning self-identity for most people. Thirdly, job crafting may assist in enhancing interactions at work.

Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research (2001)reflected that the motivation for job crafting depends on two kinds of factors. The two factors are organisation factor and individual factor. The organisation factors include: organisational goals, job context referring to job aims, work content and chance to change job, as well as supervisory control; the individual control, on the other hand, are consist of cognitive ability, perceived control, willing to change and self-image.

The research reveals that in a large extent most of employees are willing to engage to job crafting. Before investigation in benefits and effects of job crafting, it is necessary to understand motivations of employees to pursue job craft. In the first place, through job craft, employees would like to have more control over the job. Characteristic of Autonomy and freedom can improve employee’s ability to deal with adversity. In addition, some kinds of people prefer to manage work in their own way. However, the problem here is how to promote positive job crafting and reduce negative effects. Furthermore, the most important motivation for employees to conduct job crafting is satisfaction and self-image they can get through the work.

Managers also may want to craft their own jobs, because they high a relatively higher level of autonomy and power to do so. The reason is that their decisions have significant influence on large scale of employees, in other words, their changes make numerous differences for the organization. Hence understanding their role in the company, the complicated situation and the challenge they may face in crucial, which could help them to overcome the negative effect of the job crafting in some cases. Therefore, they need to think about the benefit of their own job crafting.

Techniques

Wrzesniewski and coworkers (2001 & 2003) came up with three methods regarding how employees can craft their jobs by changing the scope of the task, the amount of social interactions with other people in the work and their perceptions of the tasks. Later in 2013, Berg et al. (2013) defined these three ways as task crafting, relational crafting and cognitive crafting.

Task crafting happens when employees add/drop tasks, or change the nature of tasks. It also includes changes in the amount of time and attention spent on the tasks. If employees alter with whom they interact or the amount of interactions when they perform the jobs, it means that they engage in relational crafting the jobs. The third type of job crafting is cognitive crafting. It happens when employees alter their perceptions of the tasks.

According to Ko (2011)’s research, it is stated that besides task, relational, and cognitive crafting, there are some other types of job crafting. Environmental crafting is when individuals make changes to physical environment and other working conditions, which would make them to work more effectively and efficiently. For example, changing work schedule, work location and physical work area. Resource crafting is another type which individuals involved in activities to gain more job resources, skills, and knowledge. Individuals try to obtain more job resources needed for job crafting and/or engage in activities to improve sills and knowledge. For example, getting support from supervisor to be able to do more tasks or participating in voluntary training courses or studying by themselves.

In addition,there are generally three stages been included in almost all models:

Stage 1 : one or more factors motivated employees to craft jobs

Stage 2 : employees would figure out the various crafting options and craft their jobs in more than one ways. For this stage,research suggests that employees usually tend to shape their jobs to meet their needs, values and preferences, rather than craft according to the formal job descriptions been assigned.

Stage 3 : for job crafters, techniques of crafting are linked with outcomes of the crafting.

Besides, job crafting could vary as job could mean different to people in various fields, as according to Adam Grant and his colleagues, employee of service industry would like to see their works made great and meaningful impact to their clients, and thus craft their job for active interaction with customers. To further illustrates, there are four techniques been proposed by the research:

1. Role expended beyond basic functions, such as hairdresser not only cut hair but also inform customers hair care tip;
2. Services been specifically designed to suit preference, i.e. dentists explaining the procedures while giving the treatment;
3. Avoiding unhappy customers, such as refuse to serve rude clients;
4. Carefully select context for job conduction, for instance, fitness class in juvenile correctional facility.

One impressive effect of using these techniques to craft jobs is the positive interaction could increase employee’s motivation towards their job as well as their actual performance, since they view the value in their works.

Under situation where actual jobs are not the occupation which employees are actually passionate about, three techniques of job crafting could be apply.

1. Heavier investment of attention, time and energy into tasks that relates to personal interests, such as HR manager spend time for employment law research;
2. Take up extra work that they are passionate about;
3. Social purpose of work reframing, for instance sales approach customers as if she was a therapist.

These techniques often are linked with an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but betweenwhiles there is going to have some additional stress and desultory regret. For example, consider a teacher who volunteers to test new software in her classroom as a means of fulfilling her passion for being a computer technician. She may enjoy using the software and find it meaningful, but learning the new technology in addition to an already full workload could cause her extra stress. Also, experiencing a little taste of her passion may conjure up regretful feelings about “ what could have been” had she pursued a career as a computer technician.

Procedures

Step 1: Rethink your job and decide what to change

Firstly, you should rethink your job and arrange for the time and energy that you can devote to your tasks. After that, you can decide what to change by crafting your job through three aspects:

• Improvement: After rethinking of the job, you may have a clearer thought on what you have done and find something that is not satisfying and you can use your skills and knowledge to improve the situation.

• Relationships: Relationships with colleagues are very important aspects in a job. Maintain good relationships with the colleagues might enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of people’s work. Therefore, you can find ways to improve the relationships among colleagues.

• Aims: You can find some aspects you are interested in of your existing job. Therefore, you can better devote yourself into the work. For example, a programmer working in an airline industry could refine his work from "writing code" to "helping people enjoy trouble-free travel"

Step 2: Diagram your day and evaluate job crafting effectively

In order to make a difference in workplace, people can take advantages of graphs or diagrams in their everyday activities. Firstly, you should re look at the job you are doing and the thought about new ways to integrate your daily routines. You can use job-crafting skills, such as “strengths, motives and passions” guide your activities. As Wrzesniewski said that,” effective job crafting usually depends on finding a win-win solution”. Hence, you should try to achieve a mutually beneficial result. If it does not work well, you had better go back to step 1 and check whether there are other changes of job crafting.

Step 3: Identify job loves and hates

By adjusting and applying step 1 and step 2, you might think of some new ideas about how to manage your time and energy in your workdays. Take an accountant as an example, he may enjoy communicating with people rather than dealing with the books and journals. As a result, he can use the job-crafting skills to help him do his work as a mentor to teach new colleagues some new skills or knowledge and communicate with them. Dutton, a professor says, "I have seen local auto-industry workers benefit from the job-crafting process. "They come in looking worn down, but after spending two hours on this exercise, they come away thinking about three or four things they can do differently."

Step 4: Put your ideas into action

Surveys show that more than 50% employees are not happy with what they do. Dutton, Berg and Wrzesniewski argue that,"Emphasizing enjoyment can boost efficiency by lowering turnover rates and jacking up productivity. Job crafting gives you the chance to turn this situation around." By rethinking your job through a careful job crafting procedure, you can work better with a good emotion and positive attitude, thus increasing the effectiveness and efficiency.

Measurements

Earlier efforts to develop measurement techniques for gauging the level of job crafting occurring in an organisation have been focused on specific occupations such as manufacturers and teachers. More recently, Tims and colleagues have developed a general measurement scale that can quantify job crafting regardless of their disciplines. They used the Job demands-resources model (JD-R), a model which seeks to measure employee stress as a basis . The resultant Job Crafting Scale (JCS) was intended to apply across multiple occupational disciplines as well as encourage more empirical research on this topic. From a 3-phase study conducted by surveying 288 employees at a chemical plant in the Netherlands, their research showed that job crafting has a definitive influence on wellbeing. In this study, the authors concluded that in order for employees to be satisfied at work, they need to be able to design their own work environment that allows them to developed personally and professionally.

Tim & Bakker's 3-dimensions for job crafting measurements:

1. Strengthening job resources

Strengthening job resources was once divided into two dimensions: structural job resources increment and social job resources increment. The researchers expected that it would result in work engagement, job satisfaction and other positive outcomes. Since job resources could provide motivations for individuals, employees will reasonably avoiding lowering their job resource level.

2. Increasing challenging job demands

The challenging job demands increment is considered as another dimension of job crafting. The rational reasons behind it is that a less challenging job could possibly make individuals feel bored, raising the level of job dissatisfaction experienced. As a result, offering a suitable level of job opportunities is quite crucial for employee's motivation. Further, a more challenging job indicates higher rewards, which could stimulate employee to improve their professional capabilities and skills to make further contributions and handle more difficult tasks. Relevant research has also proven that crafting more challenging jobs encourage positive work engagement and increase job satisfaction.

3. Reducing hindering job demands.

At the time when employees find their job supply exceeds the recent demand, they may lower their demands initiatively. The unhealthy combination of low level of job resources and high demands could also result in negative consequences in the job market. The meta-analysis made by Crawford illustrated that hindrance demands of jobs could lead to negative work engagement, since employees may improve their motives to reduce demand proactively to avoid incoming cost caused by hindering demands.

Adjusted JCS for a blue collar setting:

Karina Nielsen and Johan Simonsen Abildgaard (2012) extended the current dimensions developed by Tims et al (2012) so that they are adaptable to the blue-collar industry by interviewing mail delivery workers. They found that not all items in the model proposed by Tims et al. (2012) are suitable for blue-collar workers. The extended dimensions now include descending social job demands, ascending challenging demands, rising social job resources, dropping hindering job demands and increasing quantitative demands.

Furthermore, Karina et al (2012) found that social interactions in the workplace may be both positive and negative, which is distinct from a scale only focused on rising social job resources found by Tims et al. (2012). This difference could be explained by the fact that mail delivery workers interviewed reported their co-workers both make a positive (social support) and a negative influence (a diverse workforce with various of working needs and objectives) on their work. In addition, mail delivery workers demonstrated having both positive and negative experiences with customers. This could be represented by the fact that they not only receive complaints, but also achieve appreciations sometime from customers.

Karina et al (2012) excluded the scale "Increasing structural job resources" after conducting factor analysis and explained the one potential reason may be that blue-collar workers are offered fewer opportunities to influence a high level of work, apply their full skills on work, or contribute to structural aspects of their jobs. Another explanation may be that certain items such as autonomy could be regarded as a job characteristic; however, they only affect behaviours indirectly.

As opposed to the analyses made by Tims, et. al. , two factors with regards to workload were identified. Specifically, Karina et al. (2012) included "increasing quantitative job demands", referring to behaviours that employees take to increase the amount of existing works for themselves, in their measures. This element differed from the element ‘‘Increasing challenging job demands’’ in terms of the latter concerned initiating new activities whereas ‘‘increasing quantitative job demands’’ concerned creating a greater amount of existing activities.

In addition, in 2013, Slemp proposed another generic JCS that is based on Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s original three job crafting concepts consisting of task crafting, relational crafting and cognitive crafting as explained earlier. This JCS was designed to measure the types of activities that are represented in the aforementioned three ways which employees can utilise to shape their experience of work. Similarly to Tim's study, Slemp's JCS also aimed to validate a measurement method that can be applied to various occupations. The research was conducted using participants from various Australian sectors including education, financial services, banking as well as healthcare. From this study, survey results from 334 employees have illustrated that the proposed 15-item JCS fits a three-factor (task, relational and cognitive crafting) structure via both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) methods.

Application in the workplace

In this part, the possible methods to conduct job crafting are discussed through three different angles, which are changing tasks, changing relationship and changing perceptions.

Changing tasks

In terms of changing tasks, employees usually tend to add, emphasize or redesign tasks. First of all, employees may add the tasks according to their personal preference like technology. It also contributes to employees’ skills and knowledge. Besides, when the tasks already exist what employees need to do is emphasizing the task they are interested in through more time or energy allocation. Another situation is to resign the task due to difficulty to add or emphasizing. For instance, when an experienced salesperson has a new colleague in the team, the original sales task becomes the combining of training and selling.

Changing relationship

Employees would like to change relationship through building, reframing and adapting to get the sense of meaningfulness of the work. Building relationship is a process that employees get the connection with others in their work environment and feel the worth of their jobs from others. In comparison, reframing relationship is to change the purpose of the relationship so as to enhance the meaningfulness the staff can feel from work. The last is adapting relationship. Different from building and reframing relationship, through providing support or help to others, employees can strengthen the relationship with others and contribute to the success of job for both themselves and others.

Changing perceptions

Meaningfulness of job can be developed by employees’ perceptions of their job. It means that the understanding of effect and purpose of their job plays an important role in employees’ satisfaction. Expanding perceptions reveal that staff may feel the more meaningful when they think their job as a whole. However, some people prefer to focus the perceptions which are more valuable or important for them. Last of all, linking perceptions are used to connect existed task or relationship to the areas meaningful to them.

To obtain others’support for job crafting:

Firstly, focusing on creating exclusive value for others by developing an individual strength. An employee can position his/her work to support other teams which lead to the whole promotion. It's also a good approach to help meet other groups' objectives.

Secondly,building trust with others (typically your manager). An wise employee should be careful to align efforts with the role as well as committee his tasks successful.

Thirdly,directing your job-crafting efforts to the people who can be benefit from it and are most likely to accommodate you. You can get support from anyone interested in your plans because he can take advantage of it as well. If your plan can not bring any benefit, other colleagues may held the opinion that their time would be wasted and instead focus on a more promising one.

Consequences

Job crafting is a fairly complex phenomenon and understanding the role it could potentially play in a given organization may be a daunting challenge for managers. Fortunately, researchers have revealed numerous functions and outcomes of job crafting that may give managers valuable insight into when and why employees craft their jobs, as well as the ways in which job crafting can be beneficial. When enacted in the proper manner and context, job crafters and their organizations can gain a positive influence.

Job crafting behaviour impacts on both the employee and the organisation. Employees may experience positive outcomes such as increased work engagement, person-job fit, enhanced meaning, and job satisfaction. Additionally, there is a feedback loop between positive outcomes and JD-R level. From the perspective of the employing organisation job crafting can provide benefits such as reduced personnel turnover and higher performance and commitment. However, Wrzesniewski & Dutton (2001)suggested that job crafting can also potentially yield bad outcomes for organisations, depending on the kinds of changes employees make and the effects on their motivation and performance. If the job crafting outcomes of employees were aligned with organizational objectives then it is a net positive effect, but if not, it could harm the effectiveness of the organisation.

Researchers have explored the various outcomes which may arise as a result of job crafting. Ghitulescu (2007) categorised the existent literature into 4 categories according to the outcome examined: 128.250.0.82

Meaning-based work alteration

Job crafting permits staffs to leverage their own knowledge and strength thus in doing so create more meaningfulness in their work. "Job crafting is the process of employees redefining and reimagining their job designs in personally meaningful ways," says Wrzesniewski. The central assumption of job design theory is that job characteristics with motivational potential will lead to meaning-based work and high productivity. Meaning-based work is accompanied with job-related benefits, such as, increasing the satisfaction of jobs, performance, and job motivation.

There are several possible ways which are inspired by the existing research of using job crafting as a method to assist staffs improve the meaningfulness they experience in their work. Meaning-based alteration will be achieved by job crafting though changing tasks, relationships, perceptions and crafting a better person-job fit.

Changing perceptions -Changing perceptions of a job is an effective way of using job crafting to reach meaning-based job alteration. This approach utilises the mind set potential power to make employees alter their subjectively experience of their work and at the same time remain the objective and physical of the job.

Through broadening employees' viewpoints of the objective and recognition of their work they can alter their job perspective from a set of separate tasks, to considering their jobs as a whole part. For example, Bunderson and Thompson noticed that most of the zookeepers often see their role as protector and care provider for animals though the work is feeding animals and cleaning actually and this view of their work is more motivating to them.

On the contrary to expanding perceptions, employees can also achieve meaning-based work alteration by means of narrowing the mental scope of their jobs and only concentrate on specific tasks that they feel meaningful and valuable to themselves. For instance, compared with implementing their ideas software engineers may consider creating new ideas more significant to them. Therefore, for them, taking steps back and focusing only on creating ideas is more meaningful and can motivate them to be more effective.

Apart from the aforementioned two perceptions, employees can alter traditional jobs to meaning-based work by connecting the specific tasks with the interests or aspects of their identities which they think is meaningful. For example, a person who is a customer service representative has a great interest in stand-up comedy. Therefore, he can make a connection between his comedy performance experience with the moments he spend in telling jokes to build a good terms with his customers when he is at work. Constructing the link between the two experiences can make the employee perceive more motivation from the customer service.

Organisational citizenship behaviour

Ghitulescu (2007) quoted Organ (1988)'s literature pointing out that Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) could be created through job crafting process. OCB has been found to be positively related to organisational effectiveness as it encourages favourable organisational climate resulting in higher level of job satisfaction. Organ (1988) furthered Ghitulescu (2007)'s point by introducing influential factors, which play important roles on shaping behaviours towards employees' tasks.

Selection - Personal traits are often viewed to hold an account for OCB, but there still shows no evidence of specific traits having the most influence. Empathy, perceptual threshold and level of unfairness tolerance reveal some tendencies towards an altruistic behaviour. Selection comes as a first step of the employment process; therefore, to recruit suitable candidates means pouring appropriate personalities into the job crafting process. Since skills and aptitudes are one of the important aspects in this regard, personal assessments are introduced in order to determine traits which have the greatest possibility towards OCB. However, managers may face with the uncertain basis for predicting the potential traits and end up selecting the wrong candidates.

Pay - With regard to pay, a result from survey showed that fairness and equity were significant in terms of difference in earnings. Employees tended to view their pay based on their efforts in relation to their company's profit. Hence, merit-pay plan was created to incentivise fairly and equitably for the contributions. Performance indicators were used for the assessment. Nevertheless, because they simplified how to measure qualitative and quantitative efforts, the indicators might fail to capture trivial aspects. In order to aim for the high score of the measurement, means to exploit the indicators would be discovered and exercised. Not only the indicators could not perform properly, but this could also bring poor behaviour to the workplace (eg. stop sharing knowledge due to the scare of others being better than themselves). profit-sharing plan is another rewarding system which allocate pay in accordance to the proportion of other criteria. In this case, effort would not be counted and the pay would be related to group performance. Hence, it would be more encouraging for ones to craft and extend their own jobs beyond job description to facilitate OCB.

Appraisal - Appraisal is a tool to serve human resource purposes and often in a form of rating. Pearce and Porter (1986) reported result from their study stating that rating given to employees could affect employees' organisational commitment. Their study examined the final results of the appraisal, which were "outstanding", "highly successful/highly satisfactory/ excellent/ exceeds acceptable", "successful/satisfactory/ fully satisfactory/acceptable" and "unsatisfactory/unacceptable", against the attitude changes on the organisational commitment. An "organisational commitment" questionnaire was given to the employees before the appraisal. After the appraisal, employees would receive their own rating and be asked to fill out the questionnaire again. For the appraisal result, there was no one in "unsatisfactory" category, but there were more than one-third of the employees in "satisfactory" category. What they found was the change in attitude towards the commitment after receiving feedback. "Satisfactory" group showed significant drop in organisational commitment; whereas, there was no significant impact on the "highly satisfactory" category. This illustrated that perceived fairness could change the attitude towards the commitment and discourage employees to become a good company's citizen.

Organisational ambience - Another factor that should be discussed is organisational culture, since it defines as a "complex set of values, beliefs, assumptions and symbols that define the way in which a firm conducts its business". A company that embrace fairness as part of their culture would not only be fair to the pay and appraisal, but also apply the culture to other stakeholders. Therefore, if ones perceived unfairness and failed to find compromised ideals, the result would be conflicts and might lead to unfavourable behaviour. Job crafting, in this case, would bring negative effects to the company's performance as ones might choose to narrow down their responsibility or work just enough not to get fired.

Modelling - One person effort on OCB could not make a great influence towards an organisation, but the aggregation of people would make one. Organ (1988) proposed that an organisation needed a tool that is acceptable among different parties to motivate the favourable behaviour to happen. Also, managerial employees and team leaders are regarded as a visible model to pass organisational culture to followers. Therefore, to communicate OCB to facilitate job crafting required top management team to extend their roles beyond their job descriptions.

Effects on job resources

According to the research conducted by Tims and Bakker, employees can have significant influence on their job resources. Job crafting plays an indispensable part in the utilisation of job resources, essentially, job crafting is proved to increase the amount of resources in jobs over a period of time. The result suggests that it is possible for employees to use job resources more effectively in different work scenario, even with limited amount of resources. Also, the well-being of each employee will increase as it is positively associated with increased job resources.

Effects on Job Demand

Job demand is a situation when employees take up more works because they are not given enough opportunities to use all their skills and this is done by adding more challenging works whereas job resources are usually associated with the well-being of employees such as training opportunities and performance appraisal. The authors further added that The job demand level increase if they are exposed to adequate job resources but it could lead to additional stress if there are not enough job resources to support the employees.

Emotional outcomes

Job crafting have always been a topic of interest when it comes to management and scholars have conducted many researches to analyse the potential effects that job crafting have to employees. Scholar such as Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) found the practise to be a double – edged sword to employees who are job crafting. The consequences are not always positive and if not performed accordingly, unintentional side effects will arise. Several positive emotional outcomes for performing job crafting are:

Job Satisfaction & Organizational Commitment – Individual’s conception of one’s work may change through job crafting as it helps in changing the meaning of individual’s task by modifying the jobs performed in order to let other people to see one's job in bigger terms. The argument written by Wrzesniewski and Dutton is also supported in the research conducted by Grant (2007), as he found that employees who involve in job crafting are more likely to modify their works to increase the meaningfulness of what they do at works. Both authors come into conclusion that certain level of job crafting will improve employees' job satisfaction as well as their commitment to the company.

Job Effectiveness – Motivational and cognitive factors are two sets of factors that drive employees to achieve superior performance through job crafting. The authors stated that job effectiveness could be obtained through job crafting, as job crafting will increase employees motivation to finish their works and solve problems they may encounter during their works due to employees ability to do task alterations..

Despite the positivity that job crafting will bring to employees and organizations, it is also possible that unintended negative effects will occur if job crafting is not performed in the right manner, such as:

Additional Stress – Berg, Grant and Johnson (2010) found that employees who are engaged in job crafting might suffer from additional stress. The authors further explained that the stress from the pressure of having to meet current projects’ deadline and employees desire to engage in job crafting are enough to cause not only employees but also organization to suffer. Indeed, the completion of job crafting will increase employees’ satisfaction at the cost of not being able to meet the already set deadline.

Regrets – regrets are defined as “the sadness individuals experience due to counterfactual thinking”. . Employees experience regrets when they are exposed to what the authors refer as “unanswered calling” that were previously missed by employees. . Grant (2007) further explained that regrets occur when individual’s crafting efforts were unable to give sufficient levels of satisfaction and fulfilment to employees because of the incompatibility between one’s job and the crafting ideas he or she engages in.

Overcoming difficulties - on the basis of a doctoral dissertation by Brianna Barker Caza on how midwives deal with adversity at work, she found that job crafting was a useful dealing technique for overcoming difficulties and even helped midwives emerge from their work challenges more tough than before. For example, one midwife stayed when her shift was finished to help a patient clam down. The patient had lost her husband four months earlier and was now undertaking labor without him. Her distress was slowing down her labor, and the midwife thought she could help the patient through this because she also lost a husband while expecting. Even though providing a service of this kind was not actually a part of her job, the midwife went home that day with high satisfaction because she was able to make a difference and motivated to continue assisting patients through difficulty. Starting from this point, the midwife considered counseling patients in this way to be an actual part of her job, not just a one-time thing.

Consequences of team job crafting

Previous researches mainly focus on individual job crafting. However, employees always work in a team and they are not alone. And an individual’s job crafting may influence other employees’ work in the team. So it is meaningful to consider team job crafting. Team job crafting, also called collaborative job crafting, is the process by which team members discuss together to make the decision of how to change their work to meet the common goals. As results of the recent research show, team job crafting, can improve individuals’ work engagement and so that individuals’ work performance. Firstly, when teams craft the jobs, individual employees would be facilitated to craft their own tasks. Therefore, the crafted work environment can promote individuals’ work engagement and performance. Secondly, when team engagement is improved by team job crafting, it is transmitted to the individuals in the team and they are more likely to work well.

Practical Implications

For Employees in General

Tims et al. (2013) found that job design and well-being are influenced by job crafting. They found that in a long term, those who claimed themselves participated in job crafting successfully improved their job resources, with corresponding rise of well-being. This leads to the suggestion that employees can optimize their own well-being when managers take several steps to manage their job-crafting behaviors in order to meet organizational goals. If applied properly, job crafting could help employees to improve their working conditions in different approaches and contributes significantly to the workplace. However, it is hard for organizations to accommodate the best job designs for each employee since everyone has different needs. But with job crafting, job designs are not static; they can be adapted over time to accommodate employees’ unique and ever-changing backgrounds, motives, and preferences. Job crafting theory does not diminish the significance of job designs but to value the employee's opportunities to alter them.

Fundamentally, job crafting is about resourcefulness. The success of a job crafters is highly depend on their ability in utilising the existing resources. One significant realistic meaning of job crafting is that employees should get more concern at work as it influences well-being positively. Since job crafting happens in the organisations internally, it is important for managers to notice the effect that employees have on their working environment so that they can concentrate on their work and pay more attention to job crafting. The managers have the responsibilities to manage job-crafting behaviours so that they can improve individual and organizational goals.

When it talks about collaboration, job crafting sometimes brings advantages such as efficiency and effectiveness for job crafters. However, Lyons (2008) believes if the advantages are apparently too much over other team members, it will adversely impact on team member relationship. The main reason is job crafting creates differences among team members as each individual does not share the same level of power. In this situation, management should take the responsibility to lead the sharing of learned efficiencies, to balance the differences and define the redesigned task. Managers could provide attractive incentives including promotion and bonus to those job crafters, so that they will be willing to share the achievement they have got by job crafting efforts, or the ideas they have created to produce overall improvements. By sharing the achievements not only job crafter could get return, but other employees can complete a round of training.

For Managers

Job crafting is not always positive. It may have detrimental effect if the crafting is misaligned with organizational goals or give rise to negative consequences. Although when the crafting is advantageous for the job crafter, it might be harmful for the organisation as a whole. For instance, a marketing employee may craft her job spending more time developing new branding ideas because she enjoys being creative, while what her company really looks for is to focus on their current strategy. Or an employee could actively avoid communicating with his supervisor by seeming too busy whenever she is around because he dislikes her tedious management style. This may strengthen his job satisfaction but harm his organization if the lack of communication becomes detrimental. Therefore, it is essential for managers to foster resourceful job crafting in order to strengthen its positive effect on the individual and the organisation. This can be done through designing jobs that enable workers to match their tasks with their motives, as well as the organisational's goals.

Many firms and managers encourage and sometimes expect job crafting as long as critical stakeholders can benefit from it. However, in the majority cases, most team members, including managers as well as ordinary players, consider job crafting as a furtive and evasive action. (Lyons, 2008). Consequently, management has a subconsciousness of negative attitude when they feel their authority is threatened and intuitively they refuse to accept it. It could be appropriate if the job crafter does not have sufficient grasp of their behaviour. Although the intention is meritorious, it may result in more harm than good. Nevertheless, it should be admitted that opposite situation happens by a large chance. Managers should keep an impartial viewpoint towards job crafting. Otherwise, the moral of the employees will be decreased and lower job satisfaction is predictable if managers blindly choose to impose additional control, because employees may feel being micro-managed or closely supervised.

Potential Risks and Challenges

When Job Crafting doesn't works well

Job crafting may be detrimental when it goes against organizational goals. Some possible conditions may occur that the changes employees brought to their job design may result in unnecessary effects to the entire company. It can be very stressful if one employee take responsible for to many tasks or conduct without totally understanding the manager's aim resulting in side effects of job crafting. So sometimes job crafting doesn' works very well because of the conflicts with organizations. And it cannot completely avoided.

Some side effect of Job Crafting

Sometimes the crafting is beneficial for specific job crafter although it is actually quite harmful to the organization as a whole. For instance, an employee can reduce the time he meets his supervisor by job crafting and give the explanation that he is too busy to meet his supervisor frequently. Actually, he just dislikes the tedious management style. In this way, it is evident that job crafting is quite beneficial to that individual while is harmful to the organisation and can lead to some communication problems within the organization.

Apart from the internal side effect on the organization, there may be some external side effects as well. For example, a service person would probably hopes to work fewer period at the service desk so as to reduce the imposed demands of customers. Thus, when they do job crafting, they are more likely to reduce the time staying on the desk. This, undoubtedly, will increase the employees’ work satisfaction. However, customer may be unsatisfied because of the longer waiting time. The decrease in customer satisfaction may have severe detrimental effects on the organization and even damage the image of the organization in the long run.

Challenges of Job Crafting

Research findings reveal that the perceived challenges in job crafting arise from how employees associate the obligations with their job designs, and how they convince other people in the organization to accommodate or comply with their job crafting behaviors. However, higher-rank employees and lower-rank employees have different perceptions regarding these two types of challenges, given that they have different social positions and obligations. Higher-rank groups tend to struggle with the fact that they cannot craft the job to the degree they would like due to the nature of their job designs and the obligation to ensure they are working toward the prescribed goals. Oppositely, lower-rank employees feel they have less autonomy to craft their jobs because of the prescribed job content and procedural means for how to do their work. Entry-level employees often find it hard to really change something in their work or add other tasks to the job content. Regarding the challenge of getting others to comply with or accommodate their job crafting, higher-rank employees find it challenging to avoid encroaching on their colleagues' roles and responsibilities, while lower-rank employees focus on how the position limits their power to convince their job crafting. So job crafting can be regarded as an influencing factor in how employeer conduct and do their work. And job crafting can both creat positive and negative influence for individuals and organizations at the same time but not the same direction.lastly, to tackle this challenge, managers should encouraging more outcomes and employ more effective job crafters to reap the benefit of job crafting.

Moderators

According to Times and Bakker (2010), the two main moderators of job crafting are work situation and individual characteristics.

Work situation

Job Autonomy As mentioned in the Antecedents section, job discretion which can be also defined as autonomy, affects a person's freedom to schedule their work, select the method and make decisions (Hackman& Oldham, 1976).. When the works are more independent and autonomous, employees are willing to learn more skills and able to take more responsibility. Also, it is easier for them to deal with pressure if they have high levels of job discretion(Bakker et al., 2005). . The autonomy not only indicate good job crafting at individual level but also benefit the cooperation in an organization (Leana, 2009) as the autonomous individuals would redesign the job according to their own ability and experience. According to Ghitulescu research, job autonomy can promote reshaping behavior. On the contrary, people with less autonomy may be less interested in their work than those who have more control to alter their jobs.

Group Atmosphere Based on Ghitulescu research on work situation, group psychological safety will impede employees to reshape work environments. Moreover, those groups emphasising on the team work have stronger influence on the job crafting than those groups emphasising on individual work.

Task Characteristics When work performance among employees is uncorrelated, the employees are more willing to reshape their work to achieve for meaningful results. In other words ,the interdependence of tasks mentioned in the Antecedents section can also act as a moderator of job crafting. Employees who independently perform tasks are more likely to do job crafting because it is easier for them to make adjustments to their work. Besides,Tim & Bakker's research(2010) reflected that high physical workload trends to encourage workers to craft job. The task complexity, another factor associated with task characteristics, also has positive relationship with job crafting, which means that the more complex the job is, the higher possibility of job crafting.

Rank Rank has no relationship with the initiative to craft the job but related to the characteristic of the challenges faced and the way employees deal with the challenges (Wrzesniewki & Dutton, 2010). For the employees lower in rank, their challenges are the restriction imposed by the higher rank and they need to readjust their expectation and plan, use the limited resource to gain support and do the job. For the employees with higher rank who have more responsibility and autonomy, they faced more psychological restrictions.

Individual differences

Tims & Bakker (2010) proposed that people with high level of individual differences such as proactive personality, self-efficacy, and promotion focus are more readily to engage in job crafting than those who score low on these.. A study conduct by Lyons (2008) also found that job crafting behaviour or activity correlates significantly and positively with individual differences such as self-image, perceived control, and readiness to change.

Personal motivation Work motivation which drives people to reshape the inner driving force. The employee's motivation to job craft will affect shaping their experience at work . Wrzesniewski and Dutton argued that the inner motivation is much stronger than external motivations to inspire people to work with wider range of input shaping, with more ability and confidence .

Personality traits An individual who possess a proactive personality tend to engage in positive work behaviours(eg. job crafting). Proactive staff would take the initiative to shape the working environment and make themselves much more efficient. Individuals who tend to be job crafters normally have four traits. They have confidence in themselves and own a wealth of cognitive capabilities. They feel that they are powerful enough to handle their work and whenever changes happen, they are always ready for them. Meanwhile, these characteristics they possess seem to be possible antecedents of job crafting behaviour. As the consequence, they are more likely to shape all aspects of the job. On the contrary, those who do not have such personality fail to identify the chances to alter and are likely to adapt the surroundings rather than changing it. Therefore, positive employees will work with more spontaneous behaviours and are more likely to do more job crafting to make their jobs worthwhile.

Self-efficacy Employees who are highly confident of their working abilities such as the capacity to craft the work environment would affect the reshaping themselves. And those who have the good self-efficacy are more likely to craft their job. As the results, good self-efficacy would enhance the probabilities of job crafting.

Work orientation The three basic motives for employees to craft the job are the need of control to avoid the detached feeling about the work, the need for the positive self-image and the need of interpersonal communication (Wrzesniewki and Dutton, 2001) .The employees who have high quality of self image, feel more control over the work and who are more ready to change always associated with more job crafting (Lyons,2008). The individuals who are job orientated treat their job ads the only source for living. The people who are career orientated motivated by challenging themselves and making greater in power, status and reputation. Those two kinds of people separate their job and life to two independent parts. But the third kind of people who are calling orientated relate themselves with their job and they work to make social contribution and feel inner fulfilled and satisfied when they are doing their job. According to these three orientations, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001). indicated that the career orientated employees are more likely to craft the job through increasing the communication frequency with more powerful employees or managers in order to build their own power. Both Jacobs’ (2011) Leana’s (2009) studis found that there are closely relationship between the career orientated workers and job crafting but there shows no clear relationship between job crafting and calling orientation.

Good working skills of workers According to the Ghitulescu’s study of 164 auto workers, it shows skills can effectively predict task reshaping in job crafting. And base on the research of Lyons’ investigation, it shows the growth of skills can promote the happening of job crafting. When employees want to increase their skills, they would seize as many opportunities to improve their skills. Naturally, job crafting would happen.

Career stage Fried, Grant, Levi, Hadani and Slowil (2007) illustrated that job crafting is a continuous process which may influenced by the different stages of the employees’ career life. The career dynamics model based on job design introduced by Fried etc (2007) showed that the employees in the early age of their career are more likely to craft jobs as they cares more about their career development and workers in their later career life seems become less interested in the high demanding and challenging jobs. Van den Oetelaar's suggested that the employees over 45 engage in job crafting are more likely to deliver their knowledge and skills or as a mean to react to their deceasing physical ability. Therefore, they trend to change the relationship and perceptions instead of tasks while the younger employees trend to change the tasks for the career development pathways.

Job Crafting and Other Related Concepts

Ko (2011) states that job crafting has the idea of shaping work to improve the work experiences of employees and provide better outcomes, which can be shared with other constructs.In this part, some of the other main concepts related to job crafting will be introduced and summarised based on Ko 2011's research paper.

• Job Design

Job Design is about using the organisation's role to shape employees' jobs to get them involved and caring about the work and makes them feel enjoyable (Hackman & Oldham, 1980). However, it focuses on the role of organisation in the redesigning of jobs comparing to job crafting where the employees can craft their boundaries to meet their needs. Also, job design made the assumption that employees take more tasks since they are satisfied while job crafting assumes the tasks and boundaries are modified to make the employees satisfied.

• Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB)

OCB restructures job crafting to get employees engaging in voluntary works that are not in the description of a formal job. Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) indicates the differences between the two concepts that job crafting concentrates on redesigning the job roles and boundaries to give new meanings and identities of work whereas OCB is focused on doing tasks to support the organisation or other organisation members. Though some job crafting behaviours may be considered as OCB, for example, doing additional work to complete a project, the purposes of such behaviour are differ under the two concepts.

• Task Revision

Task Revision can be defined as the actions taken by the employees to fix wrong procedures, job description, or role expectation. It focuses on problem solving to have positive impact on the organisation performance while job crafting also has the aim to enhance the meaning of current tasks.

• Personal Initiative

Personal Initiative means employees take an active role in the workplace and work more than required in a given job. It is similar to job crafting as to redefine jobs to include more work goals but it focuses more on problem solving and is focusing on following the long term goals of the organisation.

See also

Job Design