Crafting the change: the role of job crafting and regulatory focus in adaptation to organizational change

Background Organizations change rapidly nowadays. However, little is known about successful ways in which employees can adapt to the new situation that arises throughout organizational change. The present dissertation addressed job crafting as a proactive employee strategy in order to deal with and adapt to changes implemented by organizations. The conceptualization of job crafting that was employed included the following behaviors: seeking job resources (e.g., facilitating factors such as support or advice from colleagues and supervisors), seeking job challenges (e.g., more responsibilities, new challenging tasks) or reducing job demands (e.g., hindering factors at work such as workload or emotional demands). Findings Via five empirical studies this research explored the antecedents and the consequences of job crafting behaviors for employees within organizations undergoing some type of change. Employees crafted their job when their work environment provided a reason to do that (i.e., environmental antecedents), when they were motivated to do that (i.e., individual antecedents) and when their work environment did not fit with their motivational orientation (i.e., interaction between the environment and the individual as antecedent). Regulatory focus theory was used to conceptualize the individual and the organizational motivational orientation. Findings revealed that job crafting behaviors (i.e., seeking resources and seeking challenges) in general help employees to stay motivated, healthy and to perform on their tasks adequately during organizational change. Reducing demands behaviors proved to be less helpful strategies and they were linked to future employee feelings of exhaustion. Conclusion In conclusion, employees are not simply passive recipients of organizational change initiatives but they shape the conditions that help them deal with organizational change. Future research should be conducted in such settings so that organizational change is captured in a more controlled fashion. Job crafting is recommended as an additional employee strategy for future research exploring employee adaptation to organizational change. Via coaching, training or individual development plans, managers could encourage and facilitate those job crafting behaviors that have the potential to benefit employees