Job Crafting at the Team and Individual Level: Implications for Work Engagement and Performance - Tims et al. - 2013 - Article

What is job crafting?

Job crafting is a specific type of proactive work behavior of employees in which they adjust their job to their needs, skills, and preferences. It concerns proactive behaviors to change the situation or oneself to achieve greater compatibility between one´s own attributes and the organization environment. It may include changing what someone does as part of the job, how someone approaches work, or how someone interacts with others. 

What are job demands and resources?

Job crafting consists of changing one´s job demands and resources. Two types of job demands are distinguished based on their relationships with employee well-being, namely hindering and challenging job demands. Hindering job demands are demands placed on the employee that interfere with the attainment of goals. It may be associated with lower well-being and performance. Challenging job demands are demands that are experienced as difficult or stressful, but they contribute to positive outcomes, such as better skills and personal growth. 

What is the job demands-resources framework? 

Also named the JD-R model, this is an occupational stress model that states that strain is a response to imbalance between demands on the individual and the resources he or she has to deal with those demands. According to this framework, individual job crafting includes:

• Increasing structural job resources 
• Increasing social job resources
• Increasing challenging job demands
• Decreasing hindering job demands

The model defines work engagement as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, absorption, and dedication. Job crafting and work engagement are positively related, as work engagement increases when the work environment has sufficient job resources and challenges, and employees´ levels of vigor, absorption, and dedication increase when they create a work environment with enough job resources and challenges. 

How are job crafting and work engagement expected to be related to job performance?

Often when employees craft their work environment it contributes to their performance by making improvements that benefits the customer or the company. They are also often able to perform more tasks or more complex tasks, which is also a way of enhancing their performance. Besides these direct effects, job crafting may also indirectly influence job performance, via work engagement. Engaged employees are likely to experience positive emotions that lead to better performances. 

What is collaborative job crafting?

More and more often individuals perform many of their tasks in a team setting. A consequence of this is that individuals not only craft their job individually, but also engage in job crafting as a team. Collaborative job crafting refers to the process by which groups of employees determine together how they can alter their work to meet their shared work goals. It is the extent to which team members combine efforts to increase structural and social job resources as well as challenging job demands, and to decrease their hindering job demands. Examples of team job crafting are when teams together decide to learn new skills to help with their current tasks, or recognizing and dealing with the existence of hindering demands as a team. 

How is collaborative job crafting expected to be related to team performance?

Collaborative job crafting creates an optimally designed environment in which employees can perform their job tasks. It increases team work engagement, which is defined as a shared, positive, fulfilling, work-related psychological state. Team work engagement is characterized by team vigor, absorption, and dedication, and emerges from the interaction and shared experiences of the members of a work team. It has been proven to be related to enhanced team performance. 

How are collaborative job crafting and team work engagement expected to be related to individual job crafting and individual work engagement? 

The authors use three social psychological theories to examine these relationships, as they capture how individuals can obtain information from other team members. These theories are:

• Social norms capture the teams´ unwritten expectations about behaviors that are used to guide individual behaviors. Employees can pressure each other to conform to the norms, also called concertive control. Social norms may increase individual job crafting and individual work engagement when team members address issues in the team and the team responds proactively to resolve these issues. This form of team crafting gives the signal that proactive behaviors that improve the teams´ work are expected of the employees. 
• Modeling conveys information about actual displayed behaviors. Observational learning involves acquiring relevant skills and strategies by observing others. When team members together engage in collaborative job crafting, individuals may engage in this behavior also while they are working on their own tasks. 
• Emotional contagion is a mechanism through which affective experiences in the work environment cross over to individuals, affecting people's affective states, judgements, and behaviors. By interacting with employees who speak and behave enthusiastically, the same feelings and behaviors may be elicited in the interaction partner. 

What are the main results of this study? 

• Job crafting is related to job performance via work engagement at both the individual and the team level. Actively increasing job resources and challenging job demands may be a valuable strategy to increase work engagement and job performance (at both levels). 
• Decreasing hindering job demands seems to impair work engagement and may indirectly impair individual performance. It was also negatively related to team performance and unrelated to team work engagement. This may indicate that even though this kind of job crafting may reduce stress, it does not necessarily increase motivation. Increasing challenging job demands and job resources however, facilitates work engagement because employees are better able to satisfy their basic needs. 
• The only component of work engagement that related significantly to job performance was vigor. Vigor, being characterized by energetic feelings, resilience, and a motivation to invest effort at work, may enable employees to cope with their work-related demands in a more effective way. 

How did team job crafting relate to individual performance?

The results indicate the existence of an indirect relationship of collaborative job crafting to individual performance. Employees who worked in teams and crafted together were more likely to also engage in individual job crafting. Their team work engagement was found to be related to individual work engagement. The teams´ behaviors seems to establish a norm for proactively redesigning the work environment which communicates to individuals to do the same when necessary. This social norm may lead individuals to craft their work environment such that it fits with their skills and preferences. 

How can these results benefit employers? 

Job crafting should be acknowledged as an existing and powerful behavior of individuals and teams and can take place even in jobs that seem to have low levels of autonomy. Managers should assist their employees with job crafting in such a way that it helps with the organizational goals, as not every type of job crafting actually contributes to the employee, the team, or their performance. Being able to communicate clearly and provide goals to guide job crafting, may lead to higher levels of work engagement and positive individual and organizational outcomes.