Construct · 4 names · 8 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
● jangle · one idea, three measures, many siblings Nearest construct by meaningjob characteristicscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to job crafting is job characteristics.
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Wrzesniewski and Dutton's 2001 Crafting a Job introduced job crafting as the physical and cognitive changes employees make on their own initiative within the boundaries of their work. They named three forms: task crafting, altering the number, scope, or kind of tasks; relational crafting, changing who one deals with at work; and cognitive crafting, reframing how one sees the purpose of the job. The construct is defined by an employee reshaping the job from within to build meaning and identity, not by a manager redesigning it from above. This original meaning is role-based and qualitative, and it differs from the later resource-based scale, from the daily-behaviour meaning, and from the separate proactive constructs it is often confused with.[1]
Tims and Bakker's 2010 Job crafting: Towards a new model of individual job redesign recast the idea in the language of the job demands-resources model, and Tims, Bakker, and Derks's 2012 Development and validation of the job crafting scale built a measure from it. Here crafting is the changes a worker makes to their own job demands and job resources: raising structural resources such as autonomy and variety, raising social resources such as feedback and support, taking on more challenging demands, and cutting hindering demands. This is a different cut from Wrzesniewski and Dutton's three forms, because it drops cognitive crafting and adds the reduction of demands. It is a resource-oriented meaning, distinct from the original role-based one, the daily-behaviour one, and the sibling proactive constructs.[2][3]
Petrou, Demerouti, Peeters, and Schaufeli's 2012 Crafting a job on a daily basis moved the construct from a stable habit to a day-level behaviour that varies within the same person from one day to the next. They grouped daily crafting into seeking resources, seeking challenges, and reducing demands, and recorded it with a diary kept over several working days. Because the construct is placed at the level of the day, the question becomes when a person crafts rather than whether they are the kind of person who crafts, which the earlier role-based and scale-based meanings treated as a more fixed trait. This daily meaning borrows the demands-resources vocabulary but studies fluctuation rather than a stable level, and it stays separate from the original three forms and from the proactive siblings.[4]
Job crafting sits inside a family of self-started work behaviours that were named separately and are easy to confuse with it. Nicholson's 1984 A Theory of Work Role Transitions described role innovation, in which a newcomer changes the role to fit the person rather than adjusting the person to the role. Frese, Kring, Soose, and Zempel's 1996 Personal Initiative at Work, developed further by Frese and Fay in 2001, defined personal initiative as a self-starting, proactive, and persistent way of working that goes beyond what is formally required. Morrison and Phelps's 1999 Taking Charge at Work defined taking charge as voluntary, constructive efforts to bring about useful change in how work is done. Each is a real construct with its own measure; job crafting overlaps with all three but is defined by reshaping one's own job for fit and meaning, so treating them as one word blurs boundaries the literature drew on purpose.[5][6][7][8]
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