Crafting sustainable work: development of personal resources

Abstract

Purpose -The aim of this paper is to conceptualize employees' sustainable work abilities, or their long-term adaptive and proactive abilities to work, farewell at work, and contribute through working. Sustainable work is defined as to promote the development in personal resources leading to sustainable work ability. Design/methodology/approach -The conceptual paper distinguishes vital personal resources underlying an employee's sustainable work ability and categorizes these resources with the help of integral theory. Collaborative work crafting was outlined as a tool to promote the development of personal resources and sustainable work ability. Findings -Sustainable work ability depends on personal resources relating to our human nature as both individual and communal beings with both interior and exterior worlds. Work crafting may create sustainable work in which existing personal resources are benefited from, developed further through learning, or translated into novel resources. Practical implications -When formal job descriptions and preplanned job design do not work in post-industrial work, traditional job design can be replaced by collaborative work crafting, which allows development in both work and employees. Originality/value -The paper synthesizes different types of personal resources needed for sustainable working and outlines their development processes, rather than adds one more theory to explain some specific aspect of well-being, development, and functioning. The paper offers one of the first definitions of sustainable work.

Health-Promoting Managerial Work: A Theoretical Framework for a Leadership Program that Supports Knowledge and Capability to Craft Sustainable Work Practices in Daily Practice and During Organizational Change

“…To craft health-promoting working conditions in normal circumstances, and also during organizational change, managers need knowledge and support in order to handle multiple interactions and combinations of multi-component risk and resource factors across different organizational levels [17,30,37,38]. From the perspective of sustainability, this includes work with health prevention and promotion, integrated with motivation, engagement, and organizational outputs [7,9,39]. Thus, leadership programs need to support the knowledge, awareness, and capability of managers that are related to the organization of sustainable psychosocial work conditions.…”

A Case Study of Three Swedish Hospitals’ Strategies for Implementing Lean Production

“…Top-down governed rationalizations within health care have, in other research, shown to be threatening employee health (Westgaard and Winkel 2011). Previous research has reported that when LP is implemented with a narrow focus on increased efficiency, there are risks of intensification of work, increased stress, and deteriorating health among employees (Genaidy and Karwoski 2003;Parker 2003), that is, the opposite to sustainable OD (Kira et al 2010). It is in this context important to stress that hospital B was facing major cut downs independent of LP and that LP was implemented in order to mediate the negative effects of cut downs.…”

“…Sustainable implementation can, according to the literature, include both that implementation strategies are sustained over time (Buchanan et al 2005) and that the implementation contributes to improving the work environment, quality of care, and efficacy of work (Kira et al 2010). This article focuses on if the studied hospitals' chosen lean strategies contributed to lean being sustained over time.…”

Sick Leave—A Signal of Unequal Work Organizations? Gender perspectives on work environment and work organizations in the health care sector: a knowledge review

“…Here it means a working life that is sustainable from the perspectives of crafting employees' individual resources as well as by collaboration between employees and their managers in order to create organizational development (Rees et al 2010).…”