The role of cognitive job crafting in the relationship between turnover intentions, negative affect, and task mastery

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives: Drawing upon previous research on turnover intentions and job crafting, this study examines whether employees’ turnover intentions are related to higher negative affect and lower task mastery over time. It further investigates if reframing and altering the meaning of one’s work (i.e., cognitive job crafting) buffers the relationships between turnover intentions, negative affect, and task mastery.

Design and methods: We conducted a three-wave longitudinal study among caregivers. Our final sample consisted of 241 caregivers from 53 different care homes. We tested our hypotheses via path analysis while estimating standard errors that are robust to non-independence of observations.

Results: Analyses showed that cognitive crafting moderated the relationship between turnover intentions and negative affect: When caregivers cognitively crafted their job, turnover intentions were negatively related to negative affect.

Conclusions: This study indicates that cognitive crafting can be considered a coping strategy during difficult times at work. If employees do not devalue but revalue their job despite having turnover intentions, they can keep negative affect at bay. Still, this study also illustrates the limits of cognitive crafting by showing that the relationship between turnover intentions and task mastery is not affected by reframing one’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• Job crafting
• cognitive crafting
• turnover intention
• intention to leave
• negative affect
• task mastery

Acknowledgements

We thank our respondents for their participation and the research group of Cornelia Niessen for discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Dr. Alfred-Vinzl-Stiftung (Project: Pflege leben [live for care]).