Does job crafting help with organisational change
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review
Does job crafting help with organisational change? Keywords: job crafting, organisational change, job performance Job crafting or the ability of employees to change and design their work, roles and relationships has been found to produce a number of positive outcomes. A new study just published by researchers from a number of universities in the Netherlands and Greece wanted to know if (or how) job crafting helps with organisational change, particularly in times of fiscal tightening. Job crafting has been seen as a method by which employees are able to take charge of their own working life to create a meaningful, healthy and motivated work environment. It has been found that, both in times of austerity and during large-scale organisational change events and restructuring, organisations tend to be unlikely to invest in ensuring that jobs and roles are enriched and fit perfectly with the organisational strategy for development.
The best people to design a job Because job crafting means that individuals are able to shape their job characteristics, matching effort, resources and demands, usually they are the best people to ensure their job meets the demands of the organisation’s strategy. Job crafting has been found to facilitate adaptive performance during organisational change situations. This means that allowing and even expecting levels of job crafting creates greater levels of flexibility and makes the organisation as a whole more adaptable to the changing situation.
Control issue Part of the problem with job crafting is that employees are proactively changing their own jobs which tends to go against the usual top down driven change that exists in most organisational change scenarios. This can often set up a dilemma for leadership, particularly in that they can often fear a loss of control. This worry about a loss of control by the leadership and management is often exacerbated by the fact that the employees can change the organisational structure and the tasks they are performing. However, it has been found that on the whole job crafting helps organisations adapt to change and ensure strategic fit more quickly than leadership and management driven structuring and restructuring.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review Resource seeking Job crafting also includes what is known as resource seeking. This means a set of proactive work behaviours through which employees find new ways of working and learn new skills and knowledge without asking permission or going through usual management channels. This makes resource seeking dynamic, practical and fast. It has also been discovered that in scenarios where job crafting is allowed or expected employees tend to engage in a series of challenge seeking behaviours whereby they end up looking for greater levels of responsibility. Again this can be a challenge to the leadership and management, particularly in circumstances where the leadership wishes to retain tight control over the structure of the organisation. Previous research has found that job crafting increases work and organisational engagement, job performance and employability and reduces stress and burnout.
Openness to change This study looked at whether job crafting increased openness to organisational change and organisational adaptiveness. In particular, the research team was interested in what is known as adaptive performance. Adaptive performance is the ability to be able to change working practices and habits in order to maintain or increase performance in the face of internal or external changes.
Emotional direction It has been found that the emotional direction or stance that an individual takes about organisational change, a positive orientation or negative and critical orientation, drives that individual’s expectations about any particular change event. In effect the emotional direction an individual takes about organisational change is actually the representation of their evaluation of the likely outcomes of that change both for themselves and for the organisation in general. Emotional direction is important particularly in job crafting scenarios as a number of previous studies have found that individuals who assess a change event to be positive are more likely to use their job crafting efforts to facilitate adaptive performance during change implementation. By contrast employees who think the organisational change is likely to have negative consequences tend to focus their efforts on resisting the change rather than job crafting and being adaptable.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review The study The study followed 380 employees working in a range of organisations from: 1. The public sector (58.4%) 2. The private sector(33.4%), and 3. Self-employed individuals (8.2%) during organisational change events due to austerity in Greece. The changes included: • • • • • • • • • •
New tasks (report by 32% of the participants) New ways of doing existing tasks (31%) New ways of working with colleagues or clients and new networks (28%) Using new technologies (33%) Working with new products or services (70%) Working in new locations (22%), having a new manager (30%) The layoff of colleagues (54%) Pay cuts (87%) Decreases in available resources to complete tasks (54%) Organisational restructuring (94%)
A range of standardised measures were used to examine the emotional direction of the individuals, the level of job crafting used by individuals and the performance outcomes both at an individual level and an organisational level. Additionally adaptive performance was measured across the sample. A range of control variables were examined such as: • • • • •
Sector Age Gender Tenure Position and status, etc
to find out whether any of these factors may be responsible for any of the findings.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review Results 1. Firstly it was discovered that those people who could engage in job crafting and did so tended to become more efficient and consequently reduced the resources that were required to complete the job. This meant that people who engaged in job crafting were able to reduce the demands on themselves, whilst at the same time increasing performance and adaptive performance. 2. It was also found to those people with a positive emotional direction (felt that the change was the right thing to do) were significantly more adaptive than those who displayed a negative emotional direction. This means that people who are engaged with the organisation and agree with the need for change become significantly more flexible and adaptive whilst job crafting than those who disagree with the need to change or don’t like the changes. 3. It was found that, where a job crafting intervention was introduced, such that the employees were not only allowed to engage in job crafting but were also given some training on how to improve the quality of their own jobs, these employees became more adaptable and reduced their resistance to change. Additionally, where such an intervention occurred there was good evidence to show that it increased the well-being and the performance of those individuals. However, this last finding was not consistent across all of the studies in this research. 4. Another area in which this study showed job crafting to be useful was the reduction of intolerance to uncertainty. Not only did the employees who engaged in job crafting increase the fit of their job activities with the demands of the organisation, but they also found that these individuals dealt significantly better with the uncertainties created by the change than those individuals who were either not allowed to or could not engage in job crafting. 5. Previous research has found that during change events some employees actively engage in information seeking activities in order to makes sense of the change and reduce uncertainty, and others actively avoid information seeking during such times, preferring instead not to know. This study found that those individuals engaged in job crafting were also significantly more likely to increase their information seeking activities. This was seen as evidence of an increase in proactive behaviours as a result of engaging in job crafting. 6. Lastly, it was discovered that individuals who were engaged in job crafting activities tended to: a. Relate more positively to change in general b. Become more open to change c. Increase their adaptive performance d. Change their emotional stance (emotional direction) to a more positive reaction to the change.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review The job crafting intervention 1. Introduction to job crafting During the change events in the organisations studied the intervention consisted of a three-hour training workshop. This started out with a small amount of background theory, based on the JD-R model or Job Demands-Resources Model developed by researchers Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti in 2006.
There are four steps involved in the job demands resources model for job crafting: 1. Identify job demands a. Short deadlines b. High volumes of work c. Complex or boring projects d. An uncomfortable work environment e. Few opportunities to work autonomously
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review f. g. h. i.
Poor working relationships Emotionally draining tasks or roles Unclear goals or role ambiguity Limited opportunities for career advancement or personal development j. Excessively bureaucratic rules and procedures 2. Address job demands a. Get the right people doing the right jobs b. Improve workflow c. Find and eliminate bottlenecks d. Make the environment more enjoyable e. Work together as a team to reduce stress and even out demand f. Reorganise as a team in order to maximise efficiency and reduce stress g. Make sure that every member of the team understands the purpose and how they fit within the organisation 3. Identify job resources which can include the following: a. Mentoring and coaching b. Training and development c. Regular constructive feedback d. Increased autonomy e. Clarify goals f. Find out what changes they would like /get feedback from the employee 4. Promote job resources by a. Looking for opportunities for increasing knowledge, skills and development b. Engaging people in cross training so that they understand what each job needs and what it is like doing those jobs (this also creates task resiliency) c. Getting people to articulate the stress points within a job and find ways of helping them to reduce the stress by job crafting. 2. The training also included a series of exercises designed to help the employees build awareness of their working environment and the types of solutions they can craft. 3. The next part of the training involved getting participants to identify a work situation that was being affected by the organisational changes which they could alter with job crafting. These observations were then discussed in subgroups so that everybody could see other ways of approaching the issue and finding new areas in which to engage with job crafting. 4. Lastly, the participants created a personal job crafting plan which included constructing a series of job crafting goals for the next three weeks. 5. After the training and during the first week participants worked on increasing job resources. During the second week they focused on reducing job demands and in the third week the goal was to increase resources.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review 6. Additionally, coaches and mentors were on hand to help the employees with implementation. At the end of each week every employee was given time to reflect on what worked and what they had found difficult whilst trying to job craft in the preceding week.
Conclusions This study highlights the importance of job crafting for increasing employee performance and functioning during difficult organisational changes. It was found that both challenge seeking and resource seeking are important parts of developing adaptability and a positive orientation towards change. Secondly, this study discovered that simply reducing job demands during organisational change does not on its own actually help employees to adjust to organisational change. It was found that reducing job demands actually has a negative effect in that it also decreases work engagement and task performance. However, job crafting was found to enable employees to take control in a way that enables them to meet the demands of the job and be more adaptable in the face of change. The study also found that job crafting enables people to become more open to change, particularly after a training intervention that enables them not only to understand the mechanisms of job crafting but also to know how to perform it. Next it was found that job crafting increases people's well-being and sense of achievement during change, largely because it gives them the ability to make the job fit the demands of the organisation and eliminates, or at least reduces, the aspects of their job that were previously creating friction or hindering their performance. This study however throws up a bit of a paradox. Firstly, it discovered that job crafting makes employees more open to change, more adaptive and more positive in change scenarios. However, it also found that these positive outcomes did not occur as a direct result the job crafting strategies used. It is whether the employee sees the change as positive or negative that makes the difference. It appears that emotional direction and a sense of having some control over what is happening are the key contributing factors in whether your crafting will work or not.
Reference Demerouti, E., Xanthopoulou, D., Petrou, P., & Karagkounis, C. (2017). Does job crafting assist dealing with organizational changes due to austerity measures? Two studies among Greek employees. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 1-16.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review Overview A number of research studies found that job crafting increases openness to change and adaptability in the face of organisational change. This study wanted to find out what causes that effect and if it is always the case. The study found that engaging employees in job crafting during organisational change does indeed make the employees more open to change, more adaptive and more positive in change scenarios. However, it was also found this effect was largely dependent on whether the individual had a positive or negative outlook about the change. This outlook to some extent can be changed with the advent of training interventions and coaching.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Does job crafting help with organisational change? Keywords: job crafting, organisational change, job performance Job crafting or the ability of employees to change and design their work, roles and relationships has been found to produce a number of positive outcomes. A new study just published by researchers from a number of universities in the Netherlands and Greece wanted to know if (or how) job crafting helps with organisational change, particularly in times of fiscal tightening. Job crafting has been seen as a method by which employees are able to take charge of their own working life to create a meaningful, healthy and motivated work environment. It has been found that, both in times of austerity and during large-scale organisational change events and restructuring, organisations tend to be unlikely to invest in ensuring that jobs and roles are enriched and fit perfectly with the organisational strategy for development.
The best people to design a job Because job crafting means that individuals are able to shape their job characteristics, matching effort, resources and demands, usually they are the best people to ensure their job meets the demands of the organisation’s strategy. Job crafting has been found to facilitate adaptive performance during organisational change situations. This means that allowing and even expecting levels of job crafting creates greater levels of flexibility and makes the organisation as a whole more adaptable to the changing situation.
Control issue Part of the problem with job crafting is that employees are proactively changing their own jobs which tends to go against the usual top down driven change that exists in most organisational change scenarios. This can often set up a dilemma for leadership, particularly in that they can often fear a loss of control. This worry about a loss of control by the leadership and management is often exacerbated by the fact that the employees can change the organisational structure and the tasks they are performing. However, it has been found that on the whole job crafting helps organisations adapt to change and ensure strategic fit more quickly than leadership and management driven structuring and restructuring.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review Resource seeking Job crafting also includes what is known as resource seeking. This means a set of proactive work behaviours through which employees find new ways of working and learn new skills and knowledge without asking permission or going through usual management channels. This makes resource seeking dynamic, practical and fast. It has also been discovered that in scenarios where job crafting is allowed or expected employees tend to engage in a series of challenge seeking behaviours whereby they end up looking for greater levels of responsibility. Again this can be a challenge to the leadership and management, particularly in circumstances where the leadership wishes to retain tight control over the structure of the organisation. Previous research has found that job crafting increases work and organisational engagement, job performance and employability and reduces stress and burnout.
Openness to change This study looked at whether job crafting increased openness to organisational change and organisational adaptiveness. In particular, the research team was interested in what is known as adaptive performance. Adaptive performance is the ability to be able to change working practices and habits in order to maintain or increase performance in the face of internal or external changes.
Emotional direction It has been found that the emotional direction or stance that an individual takes about organisational change, a positive orientation or negative and critical orientation, drives that individual’s expectations about any particular change event. In effect the emotional direction an individual takes about organisational change is actually the representation of their evaluation of the likely outcomes of that change both for themselves and for the organisation in general. Emotional direction is important particularly in job crafting scenarios as a number of previous studies have found that individuals who assess a change event to be positive are more likely to use their job crafting efforts to facilitate adaptive performance during change implementation. By contrast employees who think the organisational change is likely to have negative consequences tend to focus their efforts on resisting the change rather than job crafting and being adaptable.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review The study The study followed 380 employees working in a range of organisations from: 1. The public sector (58.4%) 2. The private sector(33.4%), and 3. Self-employed individuals (8.2%) during organisational change events due to austerity in Greece. The changes included: • • • • • • • • • •
New tasks (report by 32% of the participants) New ways of doing existing tasks (31%) New ways of working with colleagues or clients and new networks (28%) Using new technologies (33%) Working with new products or services (70%) Working in new locations (22%), having a new manager (30%) The layoff of colleagues (54%) Pay cuts (87%) Decreases in available resources to complete tasks (54%) Organisational restructuring (94%)
A range of standardised measures were used to examine the emotional direction of the individuals, the level of job crafting used by individuals and the performance outcomes both at an individual level and an organisational level. Additionally adaptive performance was measured across the sample. A range of control variables were examined such as: • • • • •
Sector Age Gender Tenure Position and status, etc
to find out whether any of these factors may be responsible for any of the findings.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review Results 1. Firstly it was discovered that those people who could engage in job crafting and did so tended to become more efficient and consequently reduced the resources that were required to complete the job. This meant that people who engaged in job crafting were able to reduce the demands on themselves, whilst at the same time increasing performance and adaptive performance. 2. It was also found to those people with a positive emotional direction (felt that the change was the right thing to do) were significantly more adaptive than those who displayed a negative emotional direction. This means that people who are engaged with the organisation and agree with the need for change become significantly more flexible and adaptive whilst job crafting than those who disagree with the need to change or don’t like the changes. 3. It was found that, where a job crafting intervention was introduced, such that the employees were not only allowed to engage in job crafting but were also given some training on how to improve the quality of their own jobs, these employees became more adaptable and reduced their resistance to change. Additionally, where such an intervention occurred there was good evidence to show that it increased the well-being and the performance of those individuals. However, this last finding was not consistent across all of the studies in this research. 4. Another area in which this study showed job crafting to be useful was the reduction of intolerance to uncertainty. Not only did the employees who engaged in job crafting increase the fit of their job activities with the demands of the organisation, but they also found that these individuals dealt significantly better with the uncertainties created by the change than those individuals who were either not allowed to or could not engage in job crafting. 5. Previous research has found that during change events some employees actively engage in information seeking activities in order to makes sense of the change and reduce uncertainty, and others actively avoid information seeking during such times, preferring instead not to know. This study found that those individuals engaged in job crafting were also significantly more likely to increase their information seeking activities. This was seen as evidence of an increase in proactive behaviours as a result of engaging in job crafting. 6. Lastly, it was discovered that individuals who were engaged in job crafting activities tended to: a. Relate more positively to change in general b. Become more open to change c. Increase their adaptive performance d. Change their emotional stance (emotional direction) to a more positive reaction to the change.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review The job crafting intervention 1. Introduction to job crafting During the change events in the organisations studied the intervention consisted of a three-hour training workshop. This started out with a small amount of background theory, based on the JD-R model or Job Demands-Resources Model developed by researchers Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti in 2006.
There are four steps involved in the job demands resources model for job crafting: 1. Identify job demands a. Short deadlines b. High volumes of work c. Complex or boring projects d. An uncomfortable work environment e. Few opportunities to work autonomously
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review f. g. h. i.
Poor working relationships Emotionally draining tasks or roles Unclear goals or role ambiguity Limited opportunities for career advancement or personal development j. Excessively bureaucratic rules and procedures 2. Address job demands a. Get the right people doing the right jobs b. Improve workflow c. Find and eliminate bottlenecks d. Make the environment more enjoyable e. Work together as a team to reduce stress and even out demand f. Reorganise as a team in order to maximise efficiency and reduce stress g. Make sure that every member of the team understands the purpose and how they fit within the organisation 3. Identify job resources which can include the following: a. Mentoring and coaching b. Training and development c. Regular constructive feedback d. Increased autonomy e. Clarify goals f. Find out what changes they would like /get feedback from the employee 4. Promote job resources by a. Looking for opportunities for increasing knowledge, skills and development b. Engaging people in cross training so that they understand what each job needs and what it is like doing those jobs (this also creates task resiliency) c. Getting people to articulate the stress points within a job and find ways of helping them to reduce the stress by job crafting. 2. The training also included a series of exercises designed to help the employees build awareness of their working environment and the types of solutions they can craft. 3. The next part of the training involved getting participants to identify a work situation that was being affected by the organisational changes which they could alter with job crafting. These observations were then discussed in subgroups so that everybody could see other ways of approaching the issue and finding new areas in which to engage with job crafting. 4. Lastly, the participants created a personal job crafting plan which included constructing a series of job crafting goals for the next three weeks. 5. After the training and during the first week participants worked on increasing job resources. During the second week they focused on reducing job demands and in the third week the goal was to increase resources.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review 6. Additionally, coaches and mentors were on hand to help the employees with implementation. At the end of each week every employee was given time to reflect on what worked and what they had found difficult whilst trying to job craft in the preceding week.
Conclusions This study highlights the importance of job crafting for increasing employee performance and functioning during difficult organisational changes. It was found that both challenge seeking and resource seeking are important parts of developing adaptability and a positive orientation towards change. Secondly, this study discovered that simply reducing job demands during organisational change does not on its own actually help employees to adjust to organisational change. It was found that reducing job demands actually has a negative effect in that it also decreases work engagement and task performance. However, job crafting was found to enable employees to take control in a way that enables them to meet the demands of the job and be more adaptable in the face of change. The study also found that job crafting enables people to become more open to change, particularly after a training intervention that enables them not only to understand the mechanisms of job crafting but also to know how to perform it. Next it was found that job crafting increases people's well-being and sense of achievement during change, largely because it gives them the ability to make the job fit the demands of the organisation and eliminates, or at least reduces, the aspects of their job that were previously creating friction or hindering their performance. This study however throws up a bit of a paradox. Firstly, it discovered that job crafting makes employees more open to change, more adaptive and more positive in change scenarios. However, it also found that these positive outcomes did not occur as a direct result the job crafting strategies used. It is whether the employee sees the change as positive or negative that makes the difference. It appears that emotional direction and a sense of having some control over what is happening are the key contributing factors in whether your crafting will work or not.
Reference Demerouti, E., Xanthopoulou, D., Petrou, P., & Karagkounis, C. (2017). Does job crafting assist dealing with organizational changes due to austerity measures? Two studies among Greek employees. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 1-16.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
Research Intelligence Brief – The Oxford Review Overview A number of research studies found that job crafting increases openness to change and adaptability in the face of organisational change. This study wanted to find out what causes that effect and if it is always the case. The study found that engaging employees in job crafting during organisational change does indeed make the employees more open to change, more adaptive and more positive in change scenarios. However, it was also found this effect was largely dependent on whether the individual had a positive or negative outlook about the change. This outlook to some extent can be changed with the advent of training interventions and coaching.
www.oxford-review.com Copyright 2016-2017©The Oxford Review - All rights reserved
