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Today, it is emphasized that a competitive organization needs proactive employees who act quickly and efficiently before events escalate (Griffin et al., 2007). Empirical findings show that employee proactivity is positively linked to individual performance (e.g. Thompson, 2005) and team performance (Crossley et al., 2013). However, a positive link between proactivity and task performance cannot always be taken for granted, particularly for pro-self-focussed proactive behavior, such as job crafting (e.g. Belschak and Den Hartog, 2010). Job crafting is defined as “the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work” (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001, p. 179). Employees who craft their jobs change their cognitions regarding their job by pulling it together into a purposeful entity (i.e. cognitive crafting), and redesign their job by changing the amount and quality of executed tasks (i.e. task crafting) and of cultivated relationships (i.e. relational crafting) (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001). The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between these different kinds of job crafting and employees’ task performance.
We propose that employee task performance varies in relation to the active extension and reduction of tasks and relationships at work, as well as in relation to the perspective one has regarding one’s job. We base our assumptions on self-determination theory (SDT) (Deci and Ryan, 2000) and on research on counterproductive work behavior (Gruys and Sackett, 2003). We propose that employees who craft their job can act either in a productive or counterproductive way, and therefore either support or undermine task performance.
Our study contributes to research on job crafting in the following ways. First, we highlight the importance of the distinction between extending and reducing job crafting behaviors. We investigate whether the extending of tasks and relationships is evaluated as productive and the reduction of tasks and relationships is evaluated as counterproductive. By examining different forms of job crafting and their relationships with task performance, we contribute a different perspective on the relations between proactivity and task performance. Second, following the conceptualization of Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), we investigate whether altering the cognitive representation of the task boundaries, rather than the actual task boundaries, relates to task performance.
Job crafting
According to Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), job crafting is a...