Cognitive job crafting: A possible response to increasing job insecurity and declining professional prestige

Abstract

Recent research has shown that job crafting, which describes individuals' attempts to craft a job to make it correspond more to personal inclinations, skills, and abilities, can generate significant work and nonwork benefits for individuals. Using the theoretical lens of activation theory, we examined whether professionals are prompted to cognitively craft their jobs in response to the increasing perception of precarisation of their profession, measured in terms of job insecurity and perceived external prestige. We adopted a mixed methods approach among professional accountants operating in Southern Italy and the results indicated the presence of two curvilinear relationships. More specifically, we found that accountants were more likely to engage in cognitive crafting when experiencing moderate levels of job insecurity (rather than high or low) and in the presence of both low and high levels of perceived external prestige (rather than a moderate level). Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

How task, relational and cognitive crafting relate to job performance: a weekly diary study on the role of meaningfulness

“…Recent research pointed out that cognitive crafting helps employees deal with difficult situations (Buonocore et al, 2020), while cognitive crafting is beneficial for innovation performance, in conjunction with task, relational and skills crafting (Bindl et al, 2019). Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) have argued theoretically that people craft the task, cognitive and relational boundaries of their jobs because of what motivates them and to foster meaningfulness.…”

Reclaiming cognitive crafting: an integrative model of behavioral and cognitive practices in job crafting

“…The two models are noticeably different, with the JD-R model drawing on a very distinct palette of theoretical choices, compared to the original one. The new model clarified the behavioral practices of job craftingpositioning it with great explanatory success over an approach-avoidance orientation axis (Zhang and Parker, 2019) but it also undermined the ability of job crafting theory to deal with cognitive aspects, central to the phenomenon, particularly to the meaning-making processes, which are paramount (Bruning and Campion, 2018;Buonocore et al, 2020;Dash and Vohra, 2020, p. 139;Niessen et al, 2016, p. 1,289;Slemp and Vella-Brodrick, 2013;Zhang and Parker, 2019, pp. 127-128).…”

Affective Events and Proactivity

“…From a job preservation perspective, Yang et al (2019) found that the relationship between JI and taking charge is U-shaped. Buonocore et al (2020) based on activation theory proposed and found an inverted U-shaped relationship between JI and cognitive crafting.…”