Job crafting: A meta-analysis of relationships with individual differences, job characteristics, and work outcomes

Abstract

Job crafting is a form of proactive work behavior that involves employees actively changing the (perceived) characteristics of their jobs, including behaviors aimed at increasing challenging and decreasing hindering job demands, as well as those directed at increasing structural and social job resources (Tims & Bakker, 2010). Research on job crafting has rapidly increased over the past decade, but findings have thus far not been quantitatively synthesized. We first integrate job crafting as conceptualized by Tims and Bakker (2010) with a more general theoretical model of proactive work behavior. Then, we present a meta-analysis (K = 122 independent samples representing N = 35,670 workers) of relationships between job crafting behaviors and their various antecedents and work outcomes derived from our model. We consider both overall and dimension-level job crafting relationships. Notably, overall job crafting was found to be strongly associated with proactive personality (rc = 0.543), promotion regulatory focus (rc = 0.509), and work engagement (rc = 0.450). Differential results emerged when considering specific job crafting dimensions. For example, increasing challenging job demands was associated with other-rated work performance (rc = 0.422), whereas decreasing hindering job demands was related to turnover intentions (rc = 0.235). Beyond these zero-order relationships, a meta-analytic confirmatory factor analysis provides support for the operationalization of overall job crafting based upon the proposed dimensions, with the exception of decreasing hindering demands. Additionally, results of meta-analytic relative weights analyses speak to the unique relationships of all four job crafting dimensions with different work outcomes.