Vitality at work is an important factor for organizations to build a healthier, more engaged, sustainable, and productive workforce. The organizational and societal relevance of vitality at work is ...high, particularly with regard to an aging and more diverse workforce. This Special Issue focusses on what might be called sustainable performance at work: Maximizing work performance as well as worker health and well-being through employee vitality. Currently, there are still many gaps of knowledge with regard to the relationship between employee vitality and sustainable performance at work. Examples of knowledge gaps are concerned with potential determinants of vitality at work for different occupational groups (such as older workers, ethnic minority workers, and handicapped workers), pathways linking vitality to sustainable performance, or health effects of interventions targeting employee vitality and/or sustainable performance at work. With this Special Issue, we hope to provide readers with solid new findings extending the current state of knowledge about employee vitality and sustainable work performance.
Abstract
Research on
how
and
when
leader–member exchange (LMX) impacts work engagement in different public sector contexts and categories of employees is scarce. Utilising conservation of resources ...theory, we advance research on LMX and work engagement in two studies. Study 1 investigates the mediating role of a contextual resource (psychological safety) and an energy resource (job crafting) in a resource‐rich context, and Study 2 investigates the moderating role of a personal resource (optimism) in a resource‐poor context. Study 1 uses a three‐wave research design with employees from the engineering and technical divisions of an Irish public utility operating in the energy market and found that both psychological safety and job crafting functioned as partial mediators. Study 2 uses a sample of teachers and tutors from three Irish local authority education and training organisations and found that subordinate optimism moderated the LMX work engagement relationship. Our study findings highlight that both psychological safety and job crafting operated as important linking mechanisms and shed light on how LMX is linked to work engagement in the case of public utility employees. We also found that employee optimism provided an explanation of when it will impact work engagement with employees working in an education context. We highlight theory and practice implications.
PurposeDespite its flourishing development since first proposed, job crafting literature has provided limited insights into why people craft their jobs. This study theoretically develops a ...two-dimensional integrative framework for the motives of job crafting, including orientation (self-oriented vs work-oriented vs other-oriented) and self-determination (autonomous vs introjected vs external) dimensions. We further investigate the specific motives of job crafting from actor and observer perspectives.Design/methodology/approachWe conducted two critical-incident recall surveys among 120 and 100 employees from varied sectors and organizations, who responded from the actor and observer perspective respectively. 395 and 299 valid open-ended responses were then collected and coded following the steps for content analysis.FindingsDrawing from the proposed two-dimensional theoretical framework, we identified 16 specific job crafting motives from actor and observer perspectives.Practical implicationsOur findings remind managers to pay attention to employees' motives of job crafting and take appropriate managerial actions according to their varied motives.Originality/valueBy incorporating job crafting from the motivation literature and identifying diversified motives that drive employees to engage in job crafting, this qualitative study contributes to both the job crafting literature and the broader application of self-determination theory in the field of organizational behavior.
Purpose
This paper aims to unfold the mediation mechanism of job crafting, through which socially responsible human resource practices (SRHR practices) influence work meaningfulness and job strain ...among hospitality employees. It also seeks to unravel the moderating effect of authentic leadership on this indirect relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
Three survey waves were conducted to collect data from 825 employees and 128 managers from 34 four- or five-star hotels in two major cities in Vietnam. The data were analyzed through structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized relationships.
Findings
The results lent credence to the positive relationship between SRHR practices and employees’ meaningfulness of work as well as the negative nexus between SRHR practices and employees’ job strain. These relationships were mediated by employee engagement in job crafting. The results further revealed that authentic leadership functioned as a negative moderator for the impact of SRHR practices on job crafting as well as the indirect effects of SRHR practices on the two employee outcomes via job crafting.
Practical implications
The findings suggest to hospitality organizations that employees may find their work more meaningful and less stressful if they implement SRHR practices to enable them to craft their tasks. Hospitality organizations should also realize the role of authentic behavior among managers in stimulating employee job crafting behavior particularly when SRHR practices are not fully in place.
Originality/value
This study advances the understanding of the mechanisms that translate SRHR practices into hospitality employee outcomes. This work also extends the contingency perspective in the HRM literature by unraveling authentic leadership as a contingency for the impacts of SRHR practices.
This work focuses on how mixed feelings serve adaptive functions in organizational change. Failing to recognize that attitudes to change may involve both positive and negative evaluations of the ...change at the same time may affect change implementation. This article explored the relationship between ambivalence to change and adaptive performance in the context of an acquisition using a diary study. We also examined work engagement and job crafting as specific conditions under which ambivalence can lead to adaptive or nonadaptive courses of action. Our results showed that the relationship between ambivalence to change and adaptive performance is positive but not robust. We uncovered two conditions that increase ambivalent employees’ chances to adapt to organizational change: (1) either employees display high work engagement or (2) they display high reducing demands and low seeking resources. Analyses of change recipients’ reactions beyond dichotomous ones and their mechanisms will better inform practitioners and researchers.
Off-job crafting entails deliberate changes people can make in their non-work activities to meet their personal goals and satisfy psychological needs. We conducted a quasi-experimental study with a ...waitlist control group in three organizations in Finland (N = 86) to evaluate whether participation in a hybrid off-job crafting intervention stimulates employees' off-job crafting efforts and, in turn, enhances psychological need satisfaction, subjective vitality and work engagement. Intervention group participants took part in an off-job crafting workshop, set a personal crafting goal for the four-week intervention period, received support from a specifically designed smartphone app, and attended a reflection workshop. With a study design consisting of seven measurement occasions in the intervention group and four in the waitlist control group, we examined both the intra-individual and inter-individual effects of the intervention. Contrary to our expectations, intervention group participants did not improve in their off-job crafting efforts, needs satisfaction and well-being over time compared to their own baseline and the waitlist control group. We conducted a detailed process evaluation to shed light on the mechanisms possibly influencing the effectiveness of the intervention. Participants who made less progress with their goal, were less satisfied with the intervention, and participants who did not set a goal focusing on their least satisfied need, experienced a steeper decline in off-job crafting, needs satisfaction and well-being. Interestingly, setting a SMARTer goal and being a more active app user also had a negative effect on the development of one's off-job crafting, needs satisfaction and well-being over time. Keywords: off-job crafting, psychological needs, DRAMMA model, vitality, work engagement, intervention
Purpose Drawing on social support theory, this study empirically investigates the relationship between family-supportive supervisor behaviours (FSSBs) and the family cohesion of employees in the ...presence of job crafting as a mediator and passion for work as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a structural equation modelling technique on three-wave, time-lagged primary data ( N = 305) collected from employees of service sector firms in Pakistan. Findings The results reveal that FSSBs enhance the family cohesion of employees through the underlying mechanism of job crafting. Using passion for work as a moderator, the conditional analysis shows that the link between FSSBs and job crafting becomes stronger in the presence of high passion for work. Originality/value This study extends the literature on the link between FSSBs and job crafting and provides insightful theoretical contributions. This study advances social support theory by providing support for and detailing practical implications of promoting FSSBs, thus enhancing the understanding of the positive impact of job crafting behaviours across non-work spheres.
Purpose Studies show that supervisor incivility can have detrimental consequences for subordinates. However, little is known about the job and personal resources that can reduce the effect of ...supervisor incivility on subordinates' counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Based on the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) model, we investigate social job crafting (job resource) and internal locus of control (LOC; personal resource) as buffers on the relationship between supervisor incivility and subordinates' CWB toward the organization. Design/methodology/approach Two field studies to test our proposed hypotheses were conducted. A two-wave time-lagged design was used and data was collected from 115 supervisors and 318 subordinates from a large electricity provider company (study 1) and 121 employee–coworker dyads from a large insurance company (study 2). Findings Across the two studies it was found that supervisor incivility positively relates to subordinates' CWB toward the organization. Further, this relationship was weaker for individuals with high internal LOC and those who engaged in social job crafting. Practical implications The findings are helpful for HR managers to figure out how to stop supervisor incivility through civility training and motivating employees to social job crafting behavior. Originality/value This study implies that social job crafting (job resource) and internal LOC (personal resource) are essential factors that can reduce the effects of supervisor incivility on subordinates' CWB toward the organization.