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Job crafting can be viewed as changes that employees initiate in the level of job demands and job resources in order to make their own job more meaningful, engaging, and satisfying. As such, job crafting can be used to complement top-down approaches to improve jobs in order to overcome the inadequacies of job redesign approaches, to respond to the complexity of contemporary jobs, and to deal with the needs of the current workforce. This review aims to provide an overview of the conceptualizations of job crafting, the reasons why individuals craft their jobs, as well as the hypothetical predictors and outcomes of job crafting. Furthermore, this review provides suggestions to organizations on how to manage job crafting in their processes, and how to stimulate more beneficial job crafting behavior. Although research on job crafting is still in its infancy, it is worthwhile for organizations to recognize its existence and to manage it such that it has beneficial effects on the employees and the organization at large.

The purpose of this volume is to showcase alternative theoretical and methodological approaches to work and family research, and present methodological alternatives to the widely known shortcomings of current research on work and the family. In the first part of the book contributors consider various theoretical perspectives including: Positive Organizational Psychology System Theory Multi-Level Theoretical Models Dyadic Study Designs The chapters in Part Two consider a number of methodological issues including: key issues pertaining to sampling, the role of diary studies, Case Cross-over designs, Biomarkers, and Cross-Domain and Within-Domain Relations. Contributors also elaborate the conceptual and logistical issues involved in incorporating novel measurement approaches. The book will be of essential reading for researchers and students in work and organizational psychology, and related disciplines.

PurposeThis study aims to examine supervisors' temporal reminders and subordinates' pacing style as they relate to employees' absorption in work tasks, and subsequently creativity.Design/methodology/approachThe study involved a weekly diary study among 32 employees of an IT‐development department of a large multinational. An initial questionnaire measured employees' pacing style and their perceptions of supervisors' temporal reminders, after which participants completed a weekly survey for four consecutive weeks to report on their levels of task absorption and creativity.FindingsWhereas supervisors' temporal reminders related positively with task absorption for individuals who scored high rather than low on the deadline action pacing style, they related negatively to task absorption for those high rather than low on the steady action and the U‐shaped action pacing styles. Moreover, task absorption fluctuated consistently with individual creativity.Research limitations/implicationsThe way individuals allocate efforts over time is not only related to the resources they invest in activities but also to their creativity.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that creativity requires that employees find the time and space to fully immerse in their work. Supervisors can facilitate this process by customizing their leadership practices to individual differences in time use.Social implicationsIn an increasingly time‐pressured corporate society, an effective management of temporal strategies is important to ensure sustained employee well‐being as well as the quality of products in terms of creative solutions.Originality/valueThis study is the first to show that supervisors' temporal reminders relate positively to task absorption, and subsequent creativity levels, but only for specific pacing styles.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to give a state‐of‐the art overview of the Job Demands‐Resources (JD‐R) modelDesign/methodology/approachThe strengths and weaknesses of the demand‐control model and the effort‐reward imbalance model regarding their predictive value for employee well being are discussed. The paper then introduces the more flexible JD‐R model and discusses its basic premises.FindingsThe paper provides an overview of the studies that have been conducted with the JD‐R model. It discusses evidence for each of the model's main propositions. The JD‐R model can be used as a tool for human resource management. A two‐stage approach can highlight the strengths and weaknesses of individuals, work groups, departments, and organizations at large.Originality/valueThis paper challenges existing stress models, and focuses on both negative and positive indicators of employee well being. In addition, it outlines how the JD‐R model can be applied to a wide range of occupations, and be used to improve employee well being and performance.

Contemporary organizations are actively striving to achieve a higher level of environmental performance (the extent to which the organization reduces and minimizes its negative impact on the natural environment). This pursuit is not only driven by the need to comply with governmental climate change regulations but also by the desire to gain a competitive advantage. While a limited number of studies have acknowledged the importance of top executives' strategy-making on firms' environmental performance, questions still persist regarding how the role structure of the top management team (TMT) promotes the disclosure of environmental policies, and subsequently enhances firm environmental performance. Based on the attention-based view and resource-dependency perspective, this study aims to examine how TMT functional diversity is beneficial for formulating better environmental disclosures, which in turn, is expected to increase environmental performance. Additionally, we explore the extent to which external resources (i.e., government subsidies) can strengthen this relationship. We employed an archival dataset from 406 Chinese manufacturing firms over a ten-year period (2010–2019) and tested a moderated mediation model. Our findings suggest that greater functional diversity within TMTs positively influences firm environmental performance through the improved environmental disclosures, and this indirect effect is amplified when firms receive higher levels of government subsidies. Our study contributes to the existing literature on environmental governance by demonstrating that (1) functional diversity within the TMT can predict more favorable environmental performance metrics; and (2) government financial support can particularly be a booster for the relationship between TMT environmental disclosures and firm environmental performance.

Zooming into reduction‐oriented job crafting among employees, next to minimizing demands (i.e., making a job less strenuous), we introduced optimizing demands (i.e., simplifying the job and making work processes more efficient) and suggested that optimizing demands should be positively related to work engagement, whereas minimizing demands negatively related to work engagement. Moreover, we suggested that both forms of reduction‐oriented crafting can be transferred among colleagues, and this will particularly occur in jobs that are high on demands (workload and emotional demands), low on resources (autonomy), and when the colleagues have a high‐quality relationship. We examined these hypotheses among 65 dyads of employees who filled in a general questionnaire and a diary for three working days. Multilevel analyses supported the transmission of both job crafting dimensions among colleagues. Moreover, there is more transmission of minimizing demands among colleagues when workload and emotional demands are high and autonomy is low. Additionally, optimizing demands was transmitted among colleagues when autonomy was low and quality of relationship with colleague was high. Optimizing demands was positively related to work engagement, whereas minimizing demands was unrelated to work engagement. These findings imply that optimizing demands is a favourable behaviour and can be transmitted among colleagues under specific conditions.Practitioner pointsWorking smarter is related to higher work engagementEmployees model their colleague's proactive behaviourUnfavourable working conditions stimulate modelling behaviour of colleagues