The impact of job demands and resources on job crafting

Abstract

Organizations are constantly under pressure for survival in the current highly volatile work environment. This change has been accelerated by trends such as smart work environments and artificial intelligence in the organizational context. Given such uncertainty deriving from a fast rate of change and high complexity, it is vital for organizations to fully utilize and support individuals to be fully engaged in their work, setting grounds for transformation and modification of general roles and specific tasks. Based on the job demands-resources model, our hypotheses are tested using empirical data extracted from 172 subjects currently working in organizations. By commissioning a questionnaire survey method and hierarchical regression analysis, the results offer partially strong support for our proposed research model. We attained moderate support for our hypotheses, in that an individuals’ perception of job resources and job demands in the work context induce job crafting (i.e., task, cognitive, and relational), which acts as a critical mechanism arousing individual work engagement and job stress. In general, job resources (i.e., job autonomy and performance feedback) predicted work engagement, while job demands (i.e., work overload, emotional demands, and technology demands) affected job stress. Also, job demands and job resources both influenced task job crafting, while emotional demands were related to cognitive and relational job crafting, implying different paths between demands and resources and various job crafting activities. In addition, three job crafting dimensions affected work engagement, while only relational job crafting positively affected job stress.