17Crafting a Job
Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, Academy of Management Review 26(2), pp. 179–201, 2001
Linked to 23 chapters: supports 15 · contradicts 4 · mechanism 12 · same claim 1 · pairing 5
Wrzesniewski and Dutton begin from an observation that most research on work had left out. Organisational scholars had explained the experience of a job either by the person who holds it, their values and expectations, or by the job itself, its tasks and its social setting. Both accounts treat the employee as someone a job happens to. The authors argue that even in the most restricted and routine work, people shape what the work is. They call the activity job crafting and define it as the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work. A hospital cleaner who cuts tasks and avoids people has crafted a job; so has one who adds tasks, talks to patients and times the cleaning to the ward's rhythm. In both cases the job changes, and with it what the work means to the person and who they take themselves to be at work. The paper offers a model of when this happens, what forms it takes and what it does, and it is careful to say what it does not claim: crafting is not always good for the organisation, it is not available equally to everyone, and the people trapped in meaningless jobs are not to blame for failing to craft their way out.
The premise
A job, in the standard definition the authors adopt, is a set of task elements grouped under one title and designed to be done by one person. Tasks are the basic unit of the relationship between employee and organisation. Crafting works on three boundaries of that unit. The task boundary can be changed physically, by doing more, fewer or different activities. The relational boundary can be changed by choosing with whom one interacts and how. The cognitive boundary can be changed by seeing the job differently, as a heap of separate tasks or as a whole with a purpose. Any of these alters the design of the job and the social environment it sits in.
Two things follow from moving them. The first is the meaning of the work, which the authors define as a person's understanding of what their work is for. A physician may frame the work as healing people or as applying technology to illness. The second is work identity, how people define themselves at work, which is partly a set of beliefs and partly a set of claims made to others. The two feed each other. When an internet salesperson reframes the job from making sales to connecting people who would otherwise be left behind, the meaning of the work changes, and the identity changes from deal maker to champion. The authors treat the job as something re-created all the time, which is why, they say, there is no objective job against which an employee's perception can be scored, and why job crafting is not the same as job design. Job design asks how a job's features produce attitudes. Job crafting turns the arrow round: motivation and opportunity produce crafting, which produces a different job.
The model
The motivation to craft comes from three needs. The first is control. The authors cite Adler on control as a necessity of life and Braverman on alienation, whose hallmark is having no say over the tasks, conditions or purpose of the work; by taking hold of some part of it, even a small one, crafters make the job theirs. The second is a positive image of oneself, in one's own eyes and in others'. Temporary workers in Rogers's study changed the pace of their work and even their names to keep the poor image of temp work away from the good image they held of themselves. The third is connection to other people, which the authors, following Baumeister and Leary, treat as a basic drive and as a route to meaning. Not everyone is moved by these needs at work; some meet them elsewhere, and some already meet them in the job as designed. The motivation to craft is strongest where a need is going unmet.
Motivation does not act alone. It is moderated first by the perceived opportunity to craft, the sense of discretion an employee has over what they do and how. Two features of the work govern it. One is task interdependence: the more tightly one person's tasks are yoked to the timing and tasks of others, the fewer degrees of freedom there are. A hairdresser or a cleaner has many; an assembly-line worker has few. The other is monitoring. Where management controls tasks and time closely, as with a customer service agent or a telemarketer, crafting is visible and unwelcome. Where people work out of the limelight, they see more room. The authors note that the contemporary workplace pulls both ways, with surveillance of computers and e-mail on one side and flexible hours and dress on the other.
The second moderator is orientation. Earlier work, including Wrzesniewski's own survey of 1997, found that people in almost any occupation relate to their work in one of three ways: as a job, for the pay; as a career, for advancement; or as a calling, for the fulfilment of useful work. Each sees different possibilities in the same position. A human-services worker with a job orientation crafts around the tasks that pay; one with a career orientation crafts towards visible tasks and towards the people with power. A separate axis, intrinsic against extrinsic motivation, predicts expansive crafting in the one case and narrowing in the other, since extrinsic motivation has been shown to produce rigid behaviour and less creativity.
The forms of crafting are the three boundaries. Their table gives an example of each and its effect on meaning.
| Form | Example | Effect on the meaning of the work |
|---|---|---|
| Changing the number, scope or type of tasks | Design engineers taking on relational tasks that move a project to completion | Engineers become guardians or movers of projects |
| Changing the quality or amount of interaction | Hospital cleaners caring for patients and families, joining the workflow of their unit | Cleaners become helpers of the sick and see the unit as a whole they belong to |
| Changing the cognitive boundary | Nurses taking responsibility for all the small information that helps a patient | Nursing becomes patient advocacy as well as technical care |
The effects are the two already named. Crafting changes the meaning of the work by letting people reframe its purpose. The authors compare this with what workers in stigmatised occupations do: public defenders describe themselves as protecting every citizen's right to a fair trial, not as helping criminals, and Goffman's regrounding, doing an activity for reasons different from other people's, does the same work. Crafting changes identity because identities are sustained by audiences. People seek out relational partners who reflect back the self they want to hold, and by shaping who they deal with at work they take part in building who they are there. Neither effect is final. The new meaning is feedback, and an employee who changed a task boundary to gain control may find the purpose of the work has shifted in unexpected ways and craft again.
Three qualifications close the model. Crafting serves the employee and is not inherently good or bad for the organisation: a line worker who changes tasks may wreck the flow of work or raise its quality. All employees are potential crafters, but the authors refuse the implication that anyone stuck in meaningless work could choose otherwise. And crafting is often unrewarded and invisible, extra work that managers and colleagues do not see, which can benefit the organisation or expose it to legal and regulatory risk.
What it is not
The paper sets its concept against the neighbouring ones in a table, and the differences are consistent. Role innovation, role making, personal initiative, task revision and organisational citizenship all describe employees changing their work, but each is about solving a problem, meeting a goal or helping the organisation, and most assume management involvement or a good deal of autonomy. Job crafting is about meaning and identity, can be pursued alone or with others, and can occur in any kind of job.
| Perspective | Purpose of the activity | Where it happens |
|---|---|---|
| Role innovation (Schein 1971) | Improving a faulty task or role | With management; autonomous, complex work |
| Role making (Graen and Scandura 1987) | Task accomplishment | High-quality dyads in the organisation |
| Personal initiative (Frese and colleagues 1996) | Solving problems, overcoming barriers | With management; autonomous, complex work |
| Organisational citizenship (Organ 1988) | Discretionary help to others or the firm | Where satisfaction and commitment are high |
| Task revision (Staw and Boettger 1990) | Correcting procedures and roles | Where the employee has authority |
| Job crafting | Increasing meaning, changing identity | Any type of job |
The nearest relatives are job design, in the tradition of Hackman and Oldham, and the social information processing view of Salancik and Pfeffer. Job design puts managers in the crafter's chair: they set skill variety, task identity, autonomy and feedback, and employees respond. The social information view adds that colleagues' cues shape how the job is read, but still portrays the employee, in Bell and Staw's phrase, as clay to be shaped. Job crafting keeps the constructionist premise and adds an active subject. Its predictors are features of the person, the task and the organisation, and its feedback is the crafting the person has already done.
Six crafters
The examples come from qualitative studies of work, five of them by other researchers, and the authors say it is no accident that this is where crafting shows up: it is hard to catch in a survey item. The first is their own. Twenty-eight cleaners in one hospital, holding the same prescribed job, described two different jobs. One group did the minimum, avoided interaction, disliked cleaning and rated the work unskilled. The other added tasks, timed their rounds to the unit's workflow, talked with patients and visitors, helped nurses and clerks, liked the work and rated it highly skilled. The second group had moved all three boundaries: more tasks, more people, and a view of the ward as a whole in which they were part of healing rather than room cleaners.
Cohen and Sutton's hairdressers made personal disclosures, asked clients personal questions, punished those who would not reciprocate and sometimes fired clients, turning haircutting into getting to know people, in a trade where management sometimes forbids disclosure. Fletcher's female design engineers took on preserving work, rescuing projects and connecting people to resources; mutual empowering, teaching others without exposing them; achieving, which included asking for help in ways that respected others' tasks; and creating team, the conditions for collaboration. In doing so they redefined engineering as enabling the organisation's work to go smoothly. Nurses in Benner's and Jacques's studies drew patients' families into the relational boundary and treated small, unquantifiable observations as material to pass on, making the job patient advocacy. Star and Strauss's technicians did articulation work, getting things back on track after the unexpected, and what looked like chatting was often the smoothing of communication between units. Fine's restaurant cooks used shortcuts and tricks of the trade to compose a dish rather than execute steps, worked to their own aesthetic within strict cost limits, and experienced what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. In every case the employees started the crafting themselves, sometimes against management's wishes.
Managers and limits
Because crafting is the employee's act, managers can reach it only indirectly. They control rewards and the organisation of work, which can open or close opportunity. They also control who takes part in conversations about what the organisation is trying to do, and employees who know and accept the strategic goals can use them to legitimate their own crafting, as the cleaners used the hospital's mission to frame cleaning as care. Crafting takes effort and a run of creative acts, and the authors suggest that training and socialisation should acknowledge it happens.
Their list of open questions is long: when crafting helps or harms the organisation; how it unfolds over time; how it relates to needs met or unmet outside work; whether the pressure to craft is greater in stigmatised work and at low levels of the hierarchy; and whether teams craft collectively. They end on limits and on a claim. Economic constraints, occupational status and organisational norms give people unequal resources for making meaning, and those in low-autonomy jobs have always had to take it or make it. The claim is that work at the turn of the century was shifting toward free agency, with employees left to shape their own experience, and that organisations which frustrate crafting may have been driving some of the rise in people leaving to work for themselves.
Since 2001
The concept took hold faster than almost any other from its decade of organisational research, and it split in two. Tims and Bakker, and then Tims, Bakker and Derks in 2012, recast crafting in terms of job demands and resources and built a questionnaire around four behaviours: increasing structural resources, increasing social resources, increasing challenging demands and decreasing hindering demands. That scale is what most later survey studies measure, and it drops the cognitive form, which the original paper counted as a third of the idea. Meta-analyses of the survey literature find crafting associated with engagement, satisfaction and rated performance, with the effects moderate and the evidence largely self-reported and cross-sectional. Berg, Wrzesniewski and Dutton returned to the original model in 2010 and found that people at higher rank felt more constrained by their own perceptions of others' expectations, and those at lower rank more by the structure of the work, so the adaptive moves differed by position. The hospital cleaners study that inspired the paper, cited here as a working paper, circulated for years in teaching before its findings appeared in print. Later work has tried to reconcile the two traditions and to bring the cognitive boundary back. What has held up is the reversal of the arrow: that people act on jobs, and not only jobs on people, is now the default assumption in the field rather than the correction it was.