The design and development of a hybrid off-job crafting intervention to enhance needs satisfaction, well-being and performance: a study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Background: Employees dealing with job demands such as high workload and permeable work-life boundaries could benefit from bottom-up well-being strategies such as off-job crafting. We have developed a hybrid off-job crafting intervention to promote off-job crafting, a proactive pursuit to adjust one's off-job time activities to satisfy one's psychological needs. This hybrid intervention contains both on-site (two trainings) and online elements (smartphone app) to enhance employees' well-being and performance within different life domains. Methods: The study is designed as a randomized controlled trial with an intervention group and a waitlist control group. The study population will be Finnish knowledge workers. The intervention program focuses on six psychological needs (detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation) proposed by the DRAMMA model. The intervention will consist of the following components: 1) an on-site off-job crafting training, 2) an individual off-job crafting plan for the four-week intervention period, 3) Everydaily smartphone app usage, and 4) a training session for reflection. The study outcomes are assessed with online questionnaires once at baseline, weekly during the intervention period and twice after the intervention (two-week and six-week follow-up). Moreover, during the second training session, participants will participate in a process evaluation to shed light on the mechanisms that can affect the effectiveness of the intervention. Discussion: We expect that the intervention will stimulate off-job crafting behaviors, which may in turn increase well-being and performance in both non-work and work domains during and after the intervention (compared to baseline and to the control group). The intervention may provide employees with additional resources to deal with various stressors in life. Furthermore, this off-job crafting intervention could also offer performance benefits for the employers such as increased organizational citizenship behaviors among employees.

Job Crafting Promotes Internal Recovery State, Especially in Jobs that Demand Self-control: A Daily Diary Design

“…First, the ndings showed that daily job crafting was signi cantly related to end-of-day vigor and fatigue, thus suggesting that intervening to help employees do more job crafting could be bene cial. Previous studies have suggested that job crafting interventions are effective in helping employees to adapt their job demands and job resources [48][49][50], and they can enhance work engagement [50], improve job performance [51] and increase job resources [22]. Thus, we suggest that job crafting interventions can be a potential way for employees to promote their internal recovery state.…”

A randomized controlled trial to improve psychological detachment from work and well-being among employees: a study protocol comparing online CBT-based and mindfulness interventions

“…The online intervention design can also represent a potential factor of non-adherence and drop-out, as employees may feel less obliged to participate in the protocol than in face-to-face meetings. In line with previous interventions in the workplace context [ 95 ], several measures will be taken to avoid these complications. Participants will be briefed about the duration of each of the sessions and the overall intervention in an informed consent form.…”

The Forgotten Ones: Crafting for Meaning and for Affiliation in the Context of Finnish and Japanese Employees' Off-Job Lives

“…Moreover, the results of this study are encouraging for off-job well-being interventions, which could benefit from a focus on OJC for meaning and for affiliation to help individuals foster their vitality and mental well-being in general as well as job satisfaction (see Sirgy et al, 2020 regarding spillover between life domains). Such interventions could use evidence-based techniques such as writing about values and purposeful goals (Schippers and Ziegler, 2019) or strengths spotting (Kosenkranius et al, 2020). Finally, the disparate results between Finnish and Japanese employees concerning the relationships between contextual variables and OJC provide the first empirical evidence that these relationships are affected by the cultural context, which can promote or hinder OJC.…”