It’s well known that job crafting – in which employees change their behavior, approaches, or interactions on the job – can make work more engaging and fulfilling for individual employees. But can the positive benefits of job crafting also improve the performance of teams? They can indeed, according to a study published in Group & Organization Management by Maria Tims, Arnold B. Bakker, and Daantje Derks, all of Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Willem van Rhenen of Business University Nyenrode:
Recent studies have indeed shown that employees take the initiative to craft certain characteristics of their job… There is also accumulating evidence that job crafting has a positive impact on individual well-being and job performance… In the present study, we aim to expand this literature by investigating job crafting in teams. Specifically, we examine whether team job crafting is related to individual performance because it sets the stage for individual job crafting and team work engagement. We draw upon theories about norms, modeling, and emotional contagion to explain how working in a team may be related to individual employees’ behaviors and work engagement. This study contributes to the job crafting and work engagement literatures by extending job crafting to the team level.
Continue reading “Job Crafting at the Team and Individual Level: Implications for Work Engagement and Performance” in Group & Organization Management, and sign up for e-alerts about new research from the journal.
