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Job crafting refers to self-initiated changes made by employees in the task content of their jobs or social relations in the workplace to make work more meaningful. Job crafting behavior was conceptualized to be motivated by universal needs and aimed to improve employees feelings of meaningfulness of work and perceptions of work identity. The focus on personal meaningfulness differentiates job crafting from other proactive behaviour constructs. Job crafting as a construct has gained significant traction in the last 18 years as evidenced by the number of research studies, including research papers and doctoral theses, produced on this subject. In this study, the authors have critically reviewed the existing literature on job crafting and compared it with the original conceptual map, detailing the antecedents, moderators and consequences of job crafting. This comparison has been used to assess the discrepancy between conceptualized framework and actual research and to analyze the reasons behind the discrepancy and identify gaps for future research. This analysis yielded significant results such as a lack of focus on universal motives, issues with construct validity, and the increased prevalence of leadership in promoting job crafting. Implications of these findings are discussed and potential areas of further research have been outlined.
INTRODUCTION
The fast-changing nature of today s business environment has accentuated the need for employee proactivity as organizations need to be increasingly innovative and cannot rely on static job descriptions to guide employee behavior in a dynamic environment (Lee, Pak, Kim and Li, 2019). Hence, unsurprisingly, proactivity has emerged as a construct of interest among organizational researchers (Thomas, Whitman and Viswesvaran, 2010). The different types of proactive constructs include personal initiative, role innovation, organizational citizenship behavior and job crafting. Focus on personal meaningfulness (Ko, 2011), rather than organizational effectiveness, differentiates job crafting from the dominant paradigm in Organizational Behavior (OB) research that focuses on the furtherance of organizational goals (Wright, 2003).
Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) introduced and defined job crafting as the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001, p. 179 ) and postulated it as a means through which employees enhance the meaningfulness of one s job and one s work identity. Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) identified three universal motives...