Job crafting mediates how empowering leadership and employees’ core self-evaluations predict favourable and unfavourable outcomes

ABSTRACT

Based on job crafting theory and workplace resources theories, the present study develops a model of both antecedents and consequences of job crafting. We hypothesized subordinates’ perceptions of empowering leadership and core self-evaluations influence employee job crafting behaviours, which subsequently influence four outcomes: improving three employee well-being outcomes, (a) work-family enrichment, (b) flourishing, and (c) life satisfaction; and simultaneously reducing the organizational outcome of (d) deviant behaviours. Three-waves of data over nine months were collected from U.S. full-time employees (n = 276). Results showed empowering leadership and core self-evaluations positively related to expansive/approach forms of job crafting behaviours, which in turn related to the three different well-being outcomes. However, job crafting did not affect employee deviant behaviour. Instead, empowering leadership and core self-evaluations directly predicted less deviant behaviour. With the imputed data, we also found job crafting had a significant but weak relationship with deviant behaviour. These findings provide an integrated understanding of how and why employees engage in job crafting, and the important influence that job crafting has on employees’ subjective well-being. The present study advances leadership and job crafting theories, providing practical recommendations for promoting employee well-being and decreasing undesirable behaviours in the form of workplace deviance.

KEYWORDS:

• Empowering leadership
• core self-evaluations
• job crafting
• well-being
• deviant behaviour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Minseo Kim

Minseo Kim is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing, Griffith University. Her research interests include occupational stress, leadership, motivation, job crafting, and employee well-being. Email: [email protected]

Terry A. Beehr

Terry A. Beehr is a Professor of Psychology and member of the I/O Psychology faculty at Central Michigan University. His research interests include occupational stress, leadership, motivation, careers, and retirement. Email: [email protected]