CRAFTING THE JOB OR THE SELF : A NEW FRAMEWORK AND EXAMINATION OF DIFFERENTIAL PREDICTORS AND OUTCOMES OF JOB CRAFTING

Job crafting, a form of redesigning work features through employees’ self-initiated changes, has attracted increasing attention among management researchers and practitioners. Existing frameworks and research understand job crafting primarily from the standpoint of the job but overlook the fact that some crafting behaviors directly change the individual crafter instead of the job. Not attending to this possibility would lead to an insufficient understanding of the utility of job crafting. This dissertation intends to bridge this gap of knowledge with two investigations. First, based on the literature on job crafting, person-job fit, and work design, this dissertation proposes a new framework of self-oriented crafting and job-oriented crafting that distinguishes different targets of impact of job crafting. Second, this dissertation examines whether self-oriented crafting and job-oriented crafting are empirically distinct from each other by looking at their differential predictors and outcomes. Findings from three empirical studies provided initial evidence to support the arguments of this dissertation. Theoretical implications, recommendations for management practices, and future research directions are discussed.