Leaders’ role in job crafting

Dr Miha Škerlavaj

Full Professor, BI Norwegian Business School and Associate Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana (FELU)

Dr Matej Černe

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana (FELU)

Miha Škerlavaj and Matej Černe, co-authors of the article: “Build coalitions to fit: autonomy expectations, competence mobilization, and job crafting”, published in Human Resource Management, written together with the Sut I Wong, Associate Professor at the BI Norwegian Business School, talk about the importance of building coalitions that suit higher engagement in job crafting.

Organisations today highly appreciate job crafting, which enables employees to increase the control of their own work and leads to higher job satisfaction. What are the positive outcomes of job crafting for companies that we know about?

Miha Škerlavaj: Job crafting is indeed an innovation in human resource management and the way jobs are designed. Its popularity in both research and practice is hence not surprising. It is an imaginative way to complement traditional top-down approaches to job design by empowering employees to take charge of designing their own jobs – in terms of number, type and tasks, interactions with others, and the cognitive aspects of the job (such as finding meaning and purpose in what we do). A recent meta-analysis on job crafting among 122 independent samples and 35,670 workers showed that, overall, job crafting was found to be strongly associated with proactive personality and work engagement, and that it also reduces turnover intentions and contributes to higher work performance levels.

Would you say leaders have a crucial role to play in the emergence of job crafting? Why?

Miha Škerlavaj: Well, given that job crafting is bottom-up in essence, our research surprised many by showing that leaders also have a role to play. So, we see the emergence of job crafting as the interplay of the proactive behaviours of employees that should be facilitated by leadership actions and organisational in general.

Matej Černe: We are happy to see some additional research on the organisational context as an enabler of job crafting has surfaced since our article was accepted, and feel deeply that additional leadership or contextual factors should be further examined in addition to the leadership influence tactics we focused on in our study

How do the different expectations for autonomy of a leader and an employee influence job crafting?

Miha Škerlavaj: Fit matters. Leaders and employees agreeing they both expect autonomy as a crucial job-design factor while describing employees’ jobs is especially related to higher perceptions of competence mobilisation and results in more job crafting behaviours among employees. On the other hand, where there is disagreement between leaders and employees about the extent of the autonomy granted, employees believe their competence cannot be used in the workplace and this hinders their proactive engagement in job crafting, ultimately hurting individuals as well as organisations.

What kind of tactics can leaders apply to motivate their employees to engage in job crafting?

Miha Škerlavaj: Our research indicates that it is coalition building that helps.

Matej Černe: This indicates it is beneficial for leaders to include other individuals in individuals’ decision making at work. This likely enables employees to recognise other aspects of the work process aside from only their narrow jobs, and equips them with broad knowledge and some additional ideas on how they can alter their tasks to better fit their motives, values and goals.

Miha Škerlavaj: However, we do not expect that this is an exhaustive list of actions leaders can take to activate their employees to take charge, and many opportunities for additional research remain.

Which highlight in the 2016/2017 academic year would you emphasise?

Matej Černe: I would like to emphasise my participation at the annual ‘Management Olympics’, the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia in August 2017. Apart from presenting three papers and co-organising two caucus events related to two special issues we were guest editing, the best thing about this conference is coming together with scholars and friends from around the world, to exchange ideas and recharge your research batteries with positive energy. This is very valuable to look back and use for inspiration over the academic year that follows.

Miha Škerlavaj: It has been a fantastic year, with many ‘greatest hits’. Hence, I am somewhat reluctant to stress a special kind of achievement and would rather leave it to the user of the knowledge we produce to judge. On the other hand, I am really proud of the several research collaborations developed with my friends and colleagues at the FELU, the BI Norwegian Business School, UCL, Wharton, McMaster and INSEAD (to name a few), and look forward to the future. I am also truly grateful for the opportunity to do research that is relevant to many exciting organisations from Europe, Asia, and even Africa. As a rule, with a great team, a meaningful research question, and a well-run creative process, the results do not fall behind.

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Abstract:

Job crafting offers several beneficial organizational outcomes, yet little is known about what makes employees engage in it. In particular, the role of leaders in influencing their subordinates to engage in job crafting has been insufficiently studied. Drawing on role theory, we suggest that the congruence of leader-subordinate autonomy expectations nurtures subordinates’ experiences of having their competences adequately utilized in their jobs. This experience, which involves the competence mobilization of their work roles, subsequently fosters subordinates’ engagement in job-crafting behavior. A two-stage field study of 145 leader-subordinate dyads using cross-level polynomial regression and response surface analysis supported the (in)congruence hypotheses. The results also demonstrated that subordinates’ perceived competence mobilization mediates the relationship between autonomy expectation (in)congruence and job crafting. In addition, leader coalition as a moderator strengthens the effect of perceived competence mobilization as a psychological condition for job crafting. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

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Note: The content of the interview is based on the article: WONG HUMBORSTAD, Sut I, ŠKERLAVAJ, Miha, ČERNE, Matej. Build coalitions to fit: autonomy expectations, competence mobilization, and job crafting. Human resource management, ISSN 0090-4848. [Print ed.], Sep./Oct. 2017, vol. 56, iss. 5, str. 785-801, doi: 10.1002/hrm.21805. JCR 2016 IF: 1.978 ; AJG 2015 : 4 ; F

Read more in the FELU’s Yearly Review 2016/2017.

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