Align your job with yourself: The relationship between a job crafting intervention and work engagement, and the role of workload

Who wrote this article?

This article is Evy Kuijper’s First Year Paper and was written in cooperation with Dorien Kooij  and Marianne van Woerkom

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This article describes a quasi-experiment that evaluates the relationship between a job crafting intervention and work engagement. More particularly, we focused on three different types of job crafting: crafting towards strengths, crafting towards interests, and crafting towards development. Building on the conservation of resources theory, we hypothesized that participating in a job crafting intervention will be positively associated with job crafting, which in turn will promote work engagement. Additionally, based on the activation theory, we hypothesized that employees with a relatively high workload will benefit more from a job crafting intervention compared with employees with a relatively low workload. In all, 99 employees from a Dutch health care organization participated in our study (n = 45 in the treatment group; n = 54 in the control group). Results indicated that there was no association between the intervention and job crafting behaviors. However, the job crafting intervention was found to be positively related to interests crafting for workers with a relatively high workload, which in turn was associated with an increase in dedication and absorption. Additionally, we found that job crafting towards strengths was associated with all aspects of work engagement (vigor, dedication, and absorption), whereas job crafting towards interests was related to dedication and absorption, and crafting towards development was not associated with work engagement. We conclude that a job crafting intervention can be an effective tool for enhancing work engagement for employees with a high workload.

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Kuijpers, E., Kooij, D. T. A. M., & van Woerkom, M. (2020). Align your job with yourself: The relationship between a job crafting intervention and work engagement, and the role of workload. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 25(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000175