The effects of job crafting on subjective well-being amongst South African high school teachers

Abstract

Orientation: Job crafting can result in a number of positive outcomes for teachers, such as increased meaningfulness and engagement at work. Increased work engagement and psychological meaningfulness may yield positive benefits for the practice of teaching, thus highlighting the pivotal role of job crafting.Research purpose: The study’s aim was to investigate the relationship between job crafting and subjective well-being amongst South African high school teachers. Subjective well-being comprises psychological meaningfulness and work engagement. The potential mediating effect that psychological meaningfulness had on this relationship was further explored.Motivation for the study: Being in a highly stressful occupation, teachers need to continuously find ways to craft their working practices in order to deal effectively with their job demands and to capitalise on their available job resources. Furthermore, South Africa’s current education system calls for serious proactive measures to be taken to improve and rectify the current status, such as job crafting.Research approach, design and method: A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was used and administered to a sample of South African high school teachers situated in Gauteng, South Africa (N = 251).Main findings: A positive relationship was found between job crafting (increasing structural resources and challenging job demands) and work engagement. Furthermore, psychological meaningfulness mediated the relationship between job crafting and work engagement amongst the sampled high school teachers.Practical/managerial implications: Teachers who craft their work to better suit their preferences and needs will obtain greater meaning in their work and experience increased levels of work engagement. Training programmes and/or group-based interventions targeted around job crafting techniques may be particularly useful in the South African teaching context.Contribution/value-add: This study highlights the importance of job crafting to the well-being of teachers. It further contributes to the literature pertaining to job crafting and teaching specifically, as well as to the limited job crafting research that has been conducted in the South African context.

Psychological Meaningfulness and Work Engagement Effect on Doctor’s Job Satisfaction

“…It can be said that he is already engaged or attached to his work. This result supported by previous research that psychological meaningfulness contributes to work engagement (Peral & Geldenhuys, 2016).…”

Adaptación de la escala de job crafting: evidencias de validez en el contexto laboral argentino

“…Si bien en la validación inicial del instrumento (Tims et al, 2012) no se añadieron parámetros al modelo, las validaciones ejecutadas en otros países (Bacaksiz, et al, 2018;Bakker et al, 2018;Cenciotti et al, 2016;Euguchi et al, 2016;Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2016;Peral & Geldenhuys, 2016;Rofcanin et al, 2015) también han concluido que re-especificaciones como las aquí efectuadas son necesarias para obtener un ajuste óptimo entre el modelo teórico y la matriz empírica. No obstante, es sabido que añadir o suprimir parámetros solo es legítimo si existen razones fundadas para hacerlo.…”

“…No obstante, es sabido que añadir o suprimir parámetros solo es legítimo si existen razones fundadas para hacerlo. En este caso, se observa que las correlaciones entre los términos de error que fueron añadidas responden a los mismos pares de ítems que en otras adaptaciones (Bacaksiz, et al, 2018;Bakker et al, 2018;Euguchi et al, 2016;Peral & Geldenhuys, 2016). Por lo que es posible concluir que tales covarianzas deben considerarse sistemáticas antes que errores aleatorios, pudiendo deberse a características específicas de los ítems.…”

“…Sumado a esto, según lo informan estudios instrumentales desarrollados en España (Bakker et al, 2018;Sora et al, 2018), Sudáfrica (Peral & Geldenhuys, 2016), Turquía (Bacaksiz, Seren, & Tuna, 2018), China (Zhang et al, 2018), Brasil (Carvalho-Chinelato et al, 2015) e Italia (Cenciotti et al, 2016), algunos ítems de la escala original no presentaron un funcionamiento adecuado. En este sentido, o bien presentaron cargas factoriales inferiores a lo recomendado (l < .40) por los especialistas (Lloret-Segura, Ferreres, Hernández, & Tomás, 2017), o covarianzas entre los términos de error.…”

How Teachers Find Meaning in their Work and Effects on their Pedagogical Practice

“…This research took a qualitative phenomenological approach to obtain a view of participants' life-world. This research approach is useful in understanding and describing a specific phenomenon, and in reaching an understanding of the essence of participants' lived experience of the phenomenon (Johnson & Christensen, 2008;Moustakas, 1994;Yüksel & Yıldırım, 2015). In phenomenological studies, the major data gathering method involves indepth interviews with participants (Creswell, 2007).…”