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S SCHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Job CraftingMichelle French
INTRODUCTION
Research has found that many workers are looking for—but not finding—
emotional well-being in their work. Research also shows that individuals and
organizations alike suffer when people do not experience emotional well-being
in their work. Kieran Mathieson and Cynthia Miree’s 2003 manuscript ‘‘Illumi-
nating the Invisible,’’ for example, points out that employers who ignore the
issue will frequently be facedwith increasing absenteeism and turnover. Yet this
does not have to be the case, because we can use interventions such as job
crafting to support the emotional well-being of employees in the workplace.
Employees engage in job crafting when they actively create what their job is
physically, socially, and psychologically. While not well-known, job crafting
has been shown to be a means for effectively improving emotional well-being in
organizations. In order to help employees achieve emotional well-being in the
workplace and the positive outcomes that go along with it (such as increased
organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors, and
improved performance), it is important to craft jobs so that employees can
use their greatest strengths. Job crafting has been shown to increase productiv-
ity, quality, and efficiency while decreasing turnover and absenteeism. This
chapter examines the benefits of job crafting, how to design the job crafting
intervention, and factors critical to job crafting success.
555Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, Volume TwoEdited by K. H. Silber, W. R. Foshay, R. Watkins, D. Leigh, J. L. Moseley and J. C. DessingerCopyright © 2010 by International Society for Performance Improvement. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-470-52543-2
E1C23_1 10/14/2009 556
DESCRIPTION
The job crafting intervention (JCI) introduced in this chapter consists of
assessing employees’ strengths, communicating both strengths and perform-
ance goals to employees, and supporting employees in re-crafting their jobs
within the boundaries of the employer’s desired performance outcomes. This
extends beyond the view that job crafting is a process in which employees
engage without a manager’s involvement. Since all employees are prone to
engage in job crafting— formally or informally— it is wise for managers within
organizations to understand how job crafting works. Further, it is important for
employees’ job crafting activities to be aligned with the organization’s perform-
ance measures and goals. Managers can create the conditions that foster the
alignment of employee job crafting with organizational goals.
What is job crafting exactly? The concept of job crafting was introduced in
2001 by Ross School of Business’s Amy Wrzesniewski and Stern School of
Business’s Jane Dutton to describe the process people use to make a job their
own. In their 2001 article for The Academy of Management Review, they define
job crafting as ‘‘the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task
or relational boundaries of their work’’ (p. 179). Job crafters change the task
boundaries (what their job is physically) by altering the form or number of
activities they engage in while doing the job (such as a file clerk developing a
system of document filing that enables him to get his work done faster).
Employees change the cognitive task boundaries by altering the way they see
the job (for example, a fast-food fry cook thinking of herself as a ‘‘French fry
culinary artist’’). Finally, job crafters alter the relational boundaries of their jobs
by exercising discretion over with whom they interact while doing the job (for
example, a realtor choosing to work with clients and their families based on how
well she gets along with them). See Table 23.1 for more examples of job crafting.
Job crafting has the ability to contribute to emotional well-being, which
comprises the factors that make people happy. Martin Seligman of the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania defines overall happiness in 2002’s Authentic Happiness as
pleasure, engagement (also known as flow), and meaning. Pleasure includes
enjoyable experiences through the senses (such as great-tasting food) and
higher pleasures (such as comfort and fun). Engagement, or flow, is the
experience in which time stands still and a person feels completely at home,
usually during activities the person likes doing (such as sports or painting).
Meaning occurs when people pursue activities that connect them to a cause
outside of themselves and that make a positive difference in the world (such as
volunteering at a local orphanage). Taken together, these three components
comprise overall happiness. In their 2004 article for the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences’ journal Daedalus, Robert Biswas-Diener and his colleagues
also suggest that happiness can be specific to an area in life such as work,
556 HANDBOOK OF IMPROVING PERFORMANCE IN THE WORKPLACE
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marriage, or school. While happiness and emotional well-being are often used
interchangeably, in this chapter emotional well-being is comprised of overall
happiness, job satisfaction, and meaning in life and work.
According to Seligman, one of the world’s leading researchers of happiness,
satisfaction in one’s job requires a passionate commitment to work that uses
one’s top individual strengths in the service of a greater good. He recommends
re-crafting work to use one’s unique signature strengths to achieve organiza-
tional goals and to experience pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Seligman’s
recommendations for well-being in work, when combined with Wrzesniewski
and Dutton’s model, lead to a performance improvement intervention that
enables employers to guide and facilitate the job crafting process in the direction
of emotional well-being for the employee and improved performance for the
organization.
Job crafting has the potential to benefit the organization when employees’ re-
crafted meaning, identity, and work patterns align with organizational objec-
tives. Job crafting relates to the areas of job design, process redesign, and job
and task analysis in that it involves changing the processes, procedures, tasks,
and products of work.While the focus of job crafting is on increasingmeaning in
work and changing role or identity in the organization, a 2006 article by Paul
Lyons suggests that the outcomes of job crafting improve organizational
performance ‘‘through the provision of better services, processes, and/or
Table 23.1 Forms of Job Crafting
Form Example Effect on Meaning of Work
1. Changing the type or
number of job activities
Grant writers create a
timeline for completing a
grant proposal, adding or
deleting tasks based on the
deadline
Grant writers change the
meaning of their jobs to be
project managers who
complete work in a timely
manner
2. Changing the view of
the job
Salespeople in a clothing
store pick out an entire
outfit based on the
customer’s height, hair,
personality, and the
occasion
Salespeople change their
view of the job to see their
role as that of personal
wardrobe consultants with a
focus on high-quality
customer service
3. Changing the number
and manner of
interactions with others
on the job
Market researchers
coordinate their analysis
tasks with the sales force to
provide salespeople with
relevant information
Market researchers view
their data analysis as an
important part of the entire
marketing department’s
team performance
JOB CRAFTING 557
E1C23_1 10/14/2009 558
products’’ (p. 91). Not only does job crafting have the potential to enhance the
individual employee’s emotional well-being, but it can benefit the organization
as well.
All employees are potential job crafters, given the right individual and work
contexts. Job crafting is most likely to occur when individual employees have
the motivation to job craft and when perceived opportunities to engage in the
crafting act present themselves. The general effects of job crafting are to change
the individual’s meaning of work and work identity, while maintaining a focus
on alignment with organizational performance. Work identity refers to the way
individuals define themselves at work. Meaning of work is the way individuals
understand the purpose of their work or what is achieved by that work. Job
crafting acknowledges the fact that, regardless of the job description, employees
make a job fit who they are and the skills and abilities they bring to work. In
essence, job crafting describes the process employees use to make jobs their
own. When jobs enable employees to use their greatest strengths to serve a
meaningful cause, employees are more likely to experience emotional well-
being. Based on the work of Wrzesniewski and Dutton, Table 23.1 provides
examples of the three forms of job crafting, as well as the effect of the re-crafted
jobs on the meaning of work.
WHAT WE KNOW FROM RESEARCH
Job crafting finds its basis in both organizational theory and empirical research
on crafting work. It is useful to examine the existing literature to create a
theoretical context for the findings that job crafting is effective at improving
performance and promoting emotional well-being in organizations.
The Theoretical Rationale for the Effectiveness of Job Crafting
The existing research on work and job design primarily focuses on ways in
which supervisors and managers initiate changes in jobs and tasks according to
Hackman & Oldham’s 1980 book Work Redesign. Their job characteristics
model provides the dominant theoretical framework that describes how work-
ers judge their jobs to be satisfying and motivating based the objective features
of the job; these objective characteristics include skill variety, task identity and
significance, autonomy, and feedback. Wrzesniewski and Dutton go on to
suggest that ‘‘the job design perspective puts managers in the role of job
crafters’’ (p. 187).
On the other hand, the job crafting view emphasizes the proactive changes
employees make to their own work. Other theories that support the idea that
employees craft new jobs out of existing jobs include role innovation, role
making, personal initiative, organizational citizenship behaviors, and task
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revision.1 Salancik and Pfeffer’s social information processing research from
1978 also provides a foundation for job crafting by predicting how people
perform their jobs. Job crafting not only affects the way people complete their
job tasks, but it also impacts the way people see their jobs.
We also know from theoretical research that people find more meaning in
work that they feel is a ‘‘calling.’’ Bellah and his colleagues in 1985 described the
job-career-calling distinction for the meaning of work. People who view their
work as a ‘‘job’’ see it as a means to an end that allows them to earn money, and
consequently they need to enjoy their time away from work to find emotional
well-being. When people view work as a ‘‘career,’’ their job is performed out of
a desire for higher social status and increased power, which results in improved
self-esteem. In contrast, people who view their work as a ‘‘calling’’ perceive that
their employment gives them fulfillment through work that is morally and
socially meaningful.
Martin Seligman goes further to suggest in 2002 that people who view their
work as a ‘‘calling’’ are happier: an essential component of emotional well-being
in the workplace. He recommends re-crafting work to use one’s greatest indi-
vidual strengths to achieve organizational goals and to experience each of the
three elements of overall happiness: pleasure, engagement (or flow), and mean-
ing. Of these elements, Seligman says the ‘‘best understood aspect of happiness
during the workday is having flow—feeling completely at home within yourself
when you work’’ (p. 173). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneer in happiness
research who coined the term flow, asserts in his 2003 book Good Business that
‘‘redesigning theworkplace promises to lead to an enormous improvement in the
‘bottom line’ of human happiness’’ (p. 96). He declares that the ‘‘best strategy for
creating such an organization is to provide the conditions that make it conducive
for workers to experience flow’’ (p. 108). One way to facilitate the experience of
flow is for workers to use their greatest strengths at work.
The theoretical literature provides a solid foundation for the value and use of
job crafting. Now that we have grounded our discussion of job crafting in
relevant theory, the following section provides an examination of the perform-
ance outcomes reported in empirical studies of job crafting. First, we will
examine the outcomes of an empirical study of happiness interventions.
The Empirical Support for the Effectiveness of Job Crafting
A happiness study by Seligman and his colleagues in 2005 provides some of the
strongest links between emotional well-being and the job crafting intervention.
Across 477 participants, the researchers found that three happiness interven-
tions increased happiness over time and decreased symptoms of being de-
pressed. One of the two most effective exercises involved deploying an
individual’s strengths. The exercise, ‘‘using signature strengths in a new
way’’ (p. 416), consisted of participants taking an online assessment of their
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strengths and receiving feedback on their top five strengths. They were asked to
use one of these strengths in a new and different way every day for one week
(although some continued the exercise even longer on their own). The resulting
increase in happiness and decrease in depressive symptoms lasted six months.
This exercise is the most similar to the job crafting intervention presented in this
chapter and demonstrates the effectiveness of using an individual’s signature
strengths as a method to improve emotional well-being. These impacts seem to
apply across industries, as illustrated by case study examples from Wrzesniew-
ski and Dutton’s 2001 research.
Wrzesniewski and Dutton provide six examples of job crafting to illustrate its
process. The first is a study of hospital cleaning staff that reveals that cleaning
workers crafted their jobs by viewing them as critical to healing patients and by
carefully timing their tasks to increase efficiency. Next, hairdressers changed the
relational boundaries of their jobs by getting to know their clients, making
personal disclosures about themselves, and letting go of clients whose lack of
self-disclosure led to unpleasant interactions. Similarly, restaurant cooks were
found to change the task and cognitive boundaries of their jobs by decreasing
their number of tasks and expanding their view of the job tasks to see them as an
integrated artistic endeavor. Other examples show ways in which employees
actively construct their own meaning of work and work identity.
In 2006, Lyons found through a mixed-method study of thirty-four office
equipment sales representatives that 74 percent of respondents reported at least
one attempt at job crafting (or shaping) in the previous year, usually involving
changing task functions and relationships. Virtually all job crafting focused on
improvements to benefit the customer, employee, and/or company. Of those
who reported job crafting during their research interviews, 18 percent described
over four separate attempts to shape their jobs. The study also found a strong
relationship between the frequency of job crafting and the individual’s own
level of competitiveness, as measured by survey results.
Interestingly, research suggests that task interdependence (the degree to
which employees need each other to get their work done) actually encourages
the cognitive and relational aspects of crafting, while inhibiting the crafting of
tasks. Brenda Ghitulescu’s 2006 dissertation study examining 164 automotive
workers and 661 special education teachers showed that work discretion and
task complexity facilitate job crafting. Individuals’ job crafting was found to
enhance affective outcomes by increasing employees’ levels of job satisfaction
and commitment, while decreasing absenteeism and turnover. Job crafting also
increased employees’ effectiveness outcomes on quality and efficiency ratings.
These individual effects extended to improve team productivity levels as well.
In summary, a review of the research suggests the value of offering a
well-designed job crafting intervention. In the theoretical literature, the job
characteristics model describes the types of job designs initiated by managers
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that make a job satisfying and motivating for employees. The job crafting
literature describes the process employees engage in to make their jobs more
satisfying andmotivating on their own. Also presented is an empirical study that
demonstrates the effectiveness of expressing one’s signature strengths to
improve emotional well-being. Employees who engage in job crafting are shown
to increase their productivity as well. The job crafting intervention presented in
this chapter combines job crafting with strengths expression to enable employ-
ers to actively manage the process employees use to make a job more satisfying
and motivating so that employers can improve performance and well-being in
their organizations.
WHEN TO APPLY
As has been discussed, all employees are potential job crafters; thus, it is
important to understand the conditions under which job crafting is likely to be
initiated by employees. It is also imperative for managers to understand when to
get involved in this process and to apply a job crafting intervention (JCI).
The factors that enable job crafting are the motivation and perceived
opportunity to shape work. First, we will examine motivation. Employees
are motivated to job craft when they have a desire for personal control over
their jobs. Motivation for job crafting also occurs when employees want to
create a positive self-image in their work. Finally, employees are motivated to
job craft when they want to fulfill a basic desire for human connection.
Next, we look for perceived opportunities. Employees perceive opportunities
to job craft when they have a sense of freedom or discretion in their job tasks and
how they complete them. Another condition that causes employees to perceive
opportunities for job crafting occurs when job tasks require little task inter-
dependence with co-workers. Job crafting opportunities also become apparent
when employees have autonomy in their work (that is, freedom from close
monitoring or supervision by management).
It is appropriate for managers to apply the job crafting intervention to
improve performance when there is a change in performance measures or
strategic goals. Job crafting is intended to align employees’ tasks, relationships,
and cognitive boundaries with the new performance goals. Managers should
also encourage job crafting when they recognize that employees perceive that
their needs are not being met in the job as it is currently designed. This can be
evidenced by decreased productivity and increased job shopping activities
(searching for new jobs or even applying for other positions), as Minnie Osteyee
describes in her 1990 dissertation. Finally, management should initiate the JCI
when the features of the job or occupation are ‘‘stigmatized’’ and job crafting is
intended to create a positive work identity that boosts productivity, according to
Wrzesniewski and Dutton, writing in 2001.
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STRENGTHS AND CRITICISMS
Some advantages and disadvantages of job crafting are listed below:
Advantages
� People who experience more meaning in their work tend to exhibit more
productivity, organizational commitment, engagement with their work,
and organizational citizenship behaviors—going above and beyond the
call of duty to help people in the organization or the organization itself.
� Encouraging job crafting enables managers to benefit from processes in
which many employees already engage.
� Job crafters who change their work to use their signature strengths
transform a ‘‘job’’ into a ‘‘calling,’’ which in turn leads to improved
emotional well-being.
� Emotional well-being in work typically results in increased job satisfaction
and improved performance. It also has the potential to increase job tenure.
� Exercising signature strengths benefits nearly everyone involved—cus-
tomers receive better service, managers gain a more productive employee,
and the employee derives positive emotion.
Disadvantages
� Job crafting is largely improvisational and not visible to management in
some cases, which removes some degree of managerial control. The more
traditional job or process redesign may yield similar results for managers
attempting to influence employees’ job shaping activities directly.
� Workers who are unmotivated or who do not perceive opportunities to job
craft are less likely to engage in the process.
� Job crafting can greatly improve person-job fit, but may not alleviate a lack
of fit in other areas (person-group fit, person-vocation fit, and meaning-
mission fit).2
RECOMMENDED DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT, ANDIMPLEMENTATION PROCESS
The job crafting intervention (JCI) consists of assessing employees’ strengths,
communicating both strengths and performance goals with employees, and
supporting employees in re-crafting their work within the boundaries of the
employer’s desired performance outcomes. Traditionally, job crafting is thought
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to be a process initiated and directed by the individual employee. This chapter
introduces the JCI as a means for managers to become actively involved in this
process to steer job crafting in the direction of the organization’s performance
goals. Recommendations for applying the job crafting intervention follow.
1. Make the case for job crafting. Introduce job crafting to decision-makers,
supervisors, and employees. Describe the problems associated with lack
of emotional well-being in work (such as increased absenteeism or turn-
over). Note the benefits of job crafting and its success in reversing these
trends. Provide the costs incurred by implementing the job crafting in-
tervention (monetary costs of assessment materials and time needed to
assess and train employees on their strengths). Also cite the most cur-
rent incidences and associated costs of absenteeism and turnover within
the organization.
2. Assess and identify employees’ signature strengths. Strength tests—
including the VIA Inventory of Strengths3 (see viastrengths.org) and the
StrengthsFinder Profile (see strengthsfinder.com)4—can accomplish this
task. Managers who are familiar with the strengths research and who
are highly skilled at assessing a person’s signature strengths and how
they can best use them may be able to identify the employee’s strengths
through qualitative interviews. Be sure to provide employees with an
explanation of their assessment results and how their individual
strengths can be deployed in the workplace.
3. Match employees’ job tasks to their signature strengths. During the selec-
tion phase, choose employees whose signature strengths fit the work
they will do. If the employer cannot find an applicant whose signature
strengths fit the organization’s objectives, then matching strengths to
the job can be implemented gradually. With employees who have al-
ready been hired, Seligman (2002) recommends that law firms reserve
five hours of the work week for ‘‘signature strength time’’ during which
associates perform a non-routine assignment or cross-training that uses
their individual strengths in the service of the firm’s goals (p. 182). This
incremental approach can be used in other occupational settings as well.
4. Inform employees of performance measures and organizational goals.
Communicate clearly to ensure that employees have a thorough under-
standing of what performance outcomes are expected of them. Also,
make sure that employees know about the cultural norms and preferred
methods or styles for accomplishing tasks within the organization.
5. Encourage employees to re-craft their current work to use signature
strengths more often in furtherance of the organization’s performance
goals. Once it is clear that employees understand the parameters
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management has set, allow them freedom to re-craft their work within
the scope of the organization and work unit’s performance goals.
6. Measure employee performance after the job crafting intervention has
been implemented to determine whether management’s goals are being
met. Evaluate employees’ re-crafted job tasks and work patterns to de-
termine whether the employees are meeting management’s desired per-
formance outcomes, or if their re-crafted work is ineffective in
accomplishing the employer’s goals.
7. Take corrective action when necessary. Realign employees’ task and re-
lational boundaries in cases in which they have been re-crafted in ways
that prevent the desired performance.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
As detailed in this chapter, both theory and empirical results suggest that job
crafting can be an effective strategy for improving performance and enhancing
employee well-being. The following are some critical success factors of note.
Social
� The factors that enable job crafting by employees should be in place
(employees should feel motivated to engage in job crafting, and they
should perceive opportunities for job crafting). If an employee feels no
motivation to personalize his or her job, management will have to attempt
to supply extrinsic incentives, recognition, or rewards to spur what is
inherently an intrinsically motivated process.
� The perceived opportunities for job crafting occur when employees have
autonomy in completing job tasks and there is low task interdependence in
their work. According to Van der Vegt and Van de Vliert’s 2002 article for
the Journal of Managerial Psychology, this is very important for jobs in
which employees must complete their work in teams, since task inter-
dependence is embedded into jobs that are structured into teams. It is
important to note Ghitulescu’s finding that this task interdependence can
encourage re-crafting relationships and cognitive aspects of the job, but it
discourages the crafting of task boundaries. Thus, for managers who
facilitate teams, it will be important to emphasize the use of job crafting to
improve team relationships and cognitive boundaries.
Political
� Revised work patterns must be consistent with the performance and
organizational goals that the employer has set for employees. Otherwise,
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the individual employees may feel very satisfied with the new design of
their work, but they may not perform to the standards that the organi-
zation or work group requires from them. Both the individual and the
employer’s needs must be met by the re-crafted work.
Economic
� Reward systems and incentives must encourage individuals to reshape
their work to meet performance goals. Giving employees bonuses for
having completed a job crafting training, for instance, without regard for
the job crafting activities they use after the training would not necessarily
focus employees on meeting management’s performance goals. Man-
agement should target rewards to re-crafted work that meets the
employer’s goals.
Legal
� Re-crafted job tasks must fulfill the fiduciary responsibilities of the
position and of the organization. Managers should monitor employees’
performance to ensure that the task boundaries, in particular, do not
diverge from the duties that must be performed for the organization and
the particular job.
Technical
� Technology should be used to communicate effectively the performance
measures and strategic goals of the organization to individual employees.
While computer-mediated communication may be effective for aspects of
the job crafting process, face-to-face meetings may be helpful particularly
when assisting employees in re-crafting relational boundaries to improve
team performance.
Intercultural
� Culture influences the way people judge their own well-being and the
avenues through which they achieve well-being. As such, individuals
whose cultural background encourages them to fulfill their needs for
control, connection with others, or positive identity through their work are
more likely to job craft.
SUMMARYThis chapter examines the job crafting intervention as a tool for enhancing
employees’ emotional well-being in organizations. Employers can use the JCI to
create work environments where employees use their best strengths to achieve
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emotional well-being in the workplace. This increased emotional well-being in
turn leads to positive outcomes such as increased organizational commitment,
organizational citizenship behaviors, and improved performance. Job crafting
empowers employees to create work that expresses their own greatest strengths
while fulfilling the organization’s strategic and performance goals.
Notes
1. The idea that employees craft new jobs out of prescribed jobs can also be found in
theories of role innovation (Schein, 1971;Van Maanen & Schein, 1979), role making
(Graen & Scandura, 1987), personal initiative (Frese, Faye, Hilburger, Leng, & Tag,
1997), organizational citizenship behaviors (Organ, 1988, 1997), and task revision
(Staw & Boettger, 1990). Job crafting also builds on the social information process-
ing perspective (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978) by predicting how people enact their jobs.
2. Person-group fit: This is defined as the compatibility of individuals and their work
groups. See Amy Kristof’s 1996 article ‘‘Person-Organization Fit’’ for a meta-
analysis of fit literature. Person-vocation fit: Both people and occupations have
personalities; person-vocation fit is the similarity between the two. This theory is
based on Holland’s (1985) RAISEC (realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enter-
prising, conventional) typology.Meaning-mission fit: Represents the compatibility
between the personal meaning of the individual and the mission of the organiza-
tion. I wrote on this concept in my 2006 dissertation work.
3. Peterson and Seligman created the VIA Inventory of Strengths to assess individual
strengths. It can be found online at www.authentichappiness.org as well as in
Seligman (2002). This is the strengths assessment used in the empirical happiness
intervention research study.
4. Buckingham and Clifton (2001) created a helpful strengths assessment, the
StrengthsFinder Profile. The newer version is available in StrengthsFinder 2.0
(Rath, 2007).
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