What Is Unknown About Job Crafting?

Job crafting is still a fairly-new research topic. Research states that job crafting can be done individually or within a team structure (collaborative job crafting), (Tims & Bakker, 2010).. How in depth does the organizational level need to be involved in the career development of their employees? How in depth does the leadership of the team need to be involved in the career development of their employees? How much career development can the employee team member do on their own without help from their peers? Is formal training always the answer? Does job crafting start in the design of the job description?  These, along with many more questions need to be addressed in this new field of career development.

Tims, M., Bakker, A.B., and Derks, D. (2014), Daily job crafting and the self-efficacy performance relationship. Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 29 No. 5, pp. 490-507

Potential Negative Consequences of Job Crafting

A negative consequence may arise if individuals don’t comprehend what job crafting is hence. A concern is how to develop the competence of job crafting (Dierdorff & Jensen, 2018). In job crafting team members are crafting out the undesired monotonous tasks to help them perform their job efficiently. The monotonous tasks may be necessary for the job role and if not completed could cause serious consequences. The issue may be to not craft the task out but, to develop a better way of completing the task and formal training may be the answer. Another concern is allowing employee team members to create what they want may seem to be too much freedom even if it is within a job design framework, boundaries would still need to be established if a framework was developed.

Dierdorff, E. C., & Jensen, J. M. (2018). Crafting in context: Exploring when job crafting is dysfunctional for performance effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(5), 463-477. doi:10.1037/apl0000295