Abstract
Job crafting is an individually-driven work design process which refers to self initiated, proactive strategies to change the characteristics of one's job to better align the job with personal needs, goals, and skills. Individuals engage in job crafting as a means to experience greater meaning at work, a positive work identity, better work-related well-being, and better job performance. Classic job design theory typically focuses on the ways in which managers design jobs for their employees. As a work design strategy, job crafting represents a departure from this thinking in that the redesign is driven by employees, is not negotiated with the employer and may not even be noticed by the manager. This idea also distinguishes job crafting from other 'bottom-up' redesign approaches such as idiosyncratic ideals (i-deals) which explicitly involve negotiation between the employee and employer. The term 'job crafting' was originally coined by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton in 2001, however the idea that employees may redesign their jobs without the involvement of management has been present in job design literature since 1987. Wrzesniewski and Dutton's (2001) initial definition limited job crafting to three forms: Changes made by employees in their jobs tasks (i.e.task crafting), job relationships (i.e. relational crafting), and meaning of the job (i.e. cognitive crafting). More recent developments have indicated that employees may change other aspects of the job; to cover this broader scope, Maria Tims and Arnold B. Bakker proposed in 2010 that job crafting be framed within the job-demands resources (JD-R) model.
References
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