Job Crafting Intervention for Meaning and Purpose
Employees can re-envision their jobs as malleable and continuously improve their person-job fit.
We wellness professionals are an interventionist lot. Once we see that job crafting "in the wild" enhances wellbeing, reduces burnout, boosts performance, and eases adaptation to change, we want to know how we can make it happen.
And if we're going to offer job crafting programs... We want to know what what works, based on evidence..
Let's look at interventions based on two branches of job crafting:
What I call Job Crafting Classic -- as I described in I Have Seen the Future of Employee Wellbeing. It's Name is Job Crafting -- in which workers modify the tasks of their job, the personal interactions they have, and their perception of the job in order to experience a greater sense of meaning and purpose, and to increase work engagement, satisfaction, resilience, and thriving.
Job Demands-Resources Job Crafting, in which workers seek resources, seek challenges, and ratchet down "hindering" demands in order to achieve much of what's achieved in Job Crafting Classic, but with more emphasis on well-being and, theoretically, health.
Job Crafting Classic
In a controlled study at a large tech company, employees were happier and more effective in their jobs 6 weeks after completing the Job Crafting Exercise™. This quick video describes the Job Crafting Classic intervention and some outcomes...
As far as I can tell, outcomes from this particular intervention, which was spearheaded by Amy Wrysznewksi, Jane Dutton, and Justin Berg, weren't published in a peer-reviewed journal.
A Japanese study delivered a variation of The Job Crafting Exercise to 54 manufacturing managers and 25 psychiatric hospital workers. The intervention led to improved levels of work engagement, reduced stress, and an increase in job crafting behavior.
Increasing job crafting behavior -- Wrzesniewski et al describe a job-crafting mindset -- is important. The intention of these programs is not to have participants modify their jobs at the intervention workshop and then go about their merry way; it's to have them re-envision their jobs as malleable and to develop their skills and their sense of empowerment...so they can establish and continuously improve their person-job fit.
Interventions and evidence for JD-R Job Crafting are a different story -- one that will be told in Part II.