Coloring Outside the Lines of Job Design

It's easy to imagine how a white collar employee like a project manager or a data scientist might engage in job crafting. But what about, say, a machine operator or a restaurant server? Do they have enough flexibility to refashion the tasks, relationships, and other building blocks of work to more effectively match their strengths and needs?

Crafting any job presents challenges. But it can be successful across the full spectrum of occupations. Research I've previously described, as a matter of fact, included a wide variety of jobs: Silicon Valley tech workers, teachers, hospital housekeepers, chemical plant workers, police officers, and nurses, to name a few.

Less Flexibility May Mean More Job Crafting

Job crafting pioneers Justin Berg, Jane Dutton, and Amy Wrzesniewski tell us -- in Job Crafting and Meaningful Work -- why it can be easier for employees in highly structured, lower-status jobs to engage in crafting compared to those with more flexibility:

Since their jobs included tasks that had clear means and ends established (e.g., "you should service this machine using the following steps," or "you must enter these data in this way"), it was easier for them to see the “white space” in their jobs—i.e., where they could fit in new tasks or relationships or drop tasks and relationships that were not very important.

Berg and company go on to describe, in contrast, the challenges of crafting a flexible, typically white-collar, job:

Lack of structure, combined with the continuous pressure to pursue their end goals, seemed to make it more difficult for ["higher-rank employees"] to recognize opportunities to craft their jobs. In other words, to color outside the lines of a job, one needs lines there in the first place.

We talk a lot about the importance of autonomy for employee wellbeing -- and for job crafting, specifically. But more autonomy or less, at either extreme, may be suboptimal. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between.