Workshop 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Bringing The Science Of Job Crafting To Life To Make Our Work More Meaningful, Healthy And Engaging (#339)

Rob Baker 1 , Maggie (Machteld) Van den Heuvel 2
  1. Tailored Thinking, Durham, DURHAM, United Kingdom
  2. Work and Organisational Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

We personalise most aspects of our lives - our cars, clothes and holidays. Despite increasing opportunities to flex and adapt our jobs, we seldom personalise our work [1]. An approach that can successfully enable people to shape their work is ‘ job crafting’. Rather than treat work as static, crafting allows for individual re-design of tasks, demands, resources and cognitions, in line with strengths and interests [2]. Job crafting has been shown to predict well-being and performance [3] and research on how to encourage and enable job crafting through interventions is growing [4]. This workshop will focus on the theory and practice of job crafting interventions and will share pragmatic methods to enable successful job crafting behaviour and activity. The aim of the session is firstly to reflect upon recent job crafting intervention studies. Secondly, to enable participants to explore how they can apply job crafting to their own roles. And thirdly to share the latests insights on job crafting (i.e. the role of leisure crafting and its impact on well-being [5]). Participants will formulate at least one crafting action they can work on in the short-term.

  1. [1] Tims, M., Derks, D., & Bakker, A. B. (2016). Job crafting and its relationships with person–job fit and meaningfulness: A three-wave study. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 92, 44-53.
  2. [2] Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26, 179–201.
  3. [3] Rudolph, C. W., Katz, I. M., Lavigne, K. N., & Zacher, H. (2017). Job crafting: A meta-analysis of relationships with individual differences, job characteristics, and work outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 102, 112-138.
  4. [4] Heuvel, M. van den, Demerouti, E., & Peeters, M. C. W. (2015). The job crafting intervention: Effects on job resources, self-efficacy, and affective well-being. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88, 511-532.
  5. [5] Petrou, P., Bakker, A. B., & Van den Heuvel, M. (2017). Weekly job crafting and leisure crafting: Implications for meaning‐making and work engagement. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 90, 129-152.
  • Select one of the following conference tracks which best describes your submission area: Work and Organisation