Job crafting refers to the proactive actions employees take to redesign their jobs in order to get a better fit with their competencies, expectations, and wishes. So far, little is known about job crafting's underlying mechanisms. In this study, we examine how two different states of affective well‐being (workaholism and work engagement) relate to job crafting 3 months later and how these well‐being states steer different self‐management behaviours, which ultimately lead to job crafting. Structural equation modelling on a heterogeneous sample (N = 287) revealed that work engagement and workaholism both relate to expansive job crafting through different self‐management strategies. Work engagement relates to challenge and resource seeking via self‐goal setting and self‐observation strategies, whereas workaholism associates with challenge and resource seeking only through self‐goal setting. In addition, the results show a strong relationship between workaholism and self‐punishment. Altogether, the findings suggest that self‐management strategies can function as an explanatory mechanism for different job crafting behaviours.

Research shows that students experience substantial levels of burnout during their studies. This study explores the role of personal demands on students’ well-being. After providing a conceptualization of personal demands, we examined the role of personal demands in the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. Based on the Transactional Model of Stress, we hypothesized that students with high personal demands experience more burnout symptoms because they perceive more elements in their study as demanding (i.e., mediation hypothesis). At the same time, we hypothesized that the associations between study demands and burnout might be stronger for students with high versus low personal demands (i.e., moderation hypothesis). In order to test both hypotheses, we collected data from 578 master students. The data were analyzed with latent moderation and mediation analyses in Mplus. The results showed that students’ personal demands predicted burnout symptoms via the perception of study demands. Personal demands did not moderate the relationship between study demands and burnout. The findings of the present study expand the JD-R model by indicating that personal demands relate to burnout symptoms via the perception of study demands. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Practitioner pointsProviding help benefits both the beneficiary and the helper Managers should encourage the daily exchange of social resources between employees The exchange of social support between co-workers is crucial when employees face demanding clientsThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We develop a dyadic model of social exchange at work and shed light on how employees exchange support on a daily basis. In addition, we investigate when providing support relates to the work engagement of the provider. We hypothesized that the provider repeats his or her supportive action within a day when the receiver also provides support or when the receiver is engaged. We also predicted that supporting a coworker relates positively with the provider's engagement and that this relationship is strengthened when the support is given to an engaged receiver. To test our hypotheses, we used experience sampling and investigated support provision and work engagement in dyads of coworkers during the morning and afternoon of 4 working days. Multilevel analyses based on 123 dyads (N ϭ 418 -692 data points) revealed that supporting a coworker relates positively to the supporter's engagement and that this relationship is stronger when the support is given to an engaged receiver. Furthermore, results showed that the provider is more likely to repeat his/her supportive action if the receiver also provides support. We did not find a moderation effect of the receiver's engagement on the link between support provision during the morning and support provision during the afternoon. Altogether, our study provides insight on what motivates employees to support their coworkers and when providing support is most engaging. Furthermore, we show that the behavioral assumption of social exchange theory (i.e., reinvesting support in a receiver who reciprocates) exists within a daily work context.

No abstract