Pandemic-Induced Telework Challenges and Strategies.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, telework was an established discretionary practice with a considerable amount of research. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced people who had never worked from home before to do so. Our two-wave descriptive investigation provides a historical snapshot of what approximately 400 teleworkers experienced in the first two to three months of the pandemic. We explored how this experience differed for those who had previously teleworked, those who had children in their home, and those who had supervisory responsibilities. The data exposed telework challenges and pandemic-specific challenges. The results support job crafting theories that teleworkers proactively implement strategies to adjust their boundaries and relationships to meet their need (Biron et al., Personnel Review, 2022). The data also revealed that employees were still struggling two months later, despite implementing strategies like self-care, taking breaks, and psychological reframing. This research provides detailed evidence of how pandemic-induced telework is not the same as traditional telework and some initial evidence of the pandemic-induced telework adjustment time period. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41542-023-00151-1.

Relationship between leadership-member exchange (LMX) and flow at work among medical workers during the COVID-19: the mediating role of job crafting.

Based on relational leadership theory and self-determination theory, this study aims to investigate the relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX), job crafting, and flow at work among medical workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants in the study consisted of 424 hospital employees. The results showed that: (1) the LMX positively predicted flow at work; (2) two types of job crafting (increasing structural job resources and challenging job demands) played a mediating role between the LMX and flow at work; and (3) gender did not moderate these mediating effects as suggested by previous studies. These results indicate that the LMX can not only directly predict flow at work, but also indirectly predict work-related flow through job crafting by increasing structural job resources and challenging job demands, thus providing new insights for enhancing flow experiences of medical workers.

Crafting telework: a process model of need satisfaction to foster telework outcomes

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to offer a model explicating telework as a dynamic process, theorizing that teleworkers continuously adjust – their identities, boundaries and relationships – to meet their own needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness in their work and nonwork roles.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses the lens of job crafting to posit changes teleworkers make to enhance work-nonwork balance and job performance, including time-related individual differences to account for contingencies in dynamic adjustments. Finally, this study discusses how feedback from work and nonwork role partners and one's self-evaluation results in an iterative process of learning to telework over time.FindingsThis model describes how teleworkers craft work and nonwork roles to satisfy needs, enhancing key outcomes and eliciting role partner feedback to further recraft telework.Research limitations/implicationsThe propositions can be translated to hypotheses. As such the dynamic model for crafting telework can be used as a basis for empirical studies aimed at understanding how telework adjustment process unfolds.Practical implicationsIntervention studies could focus on teleworkers' job crafting behavior. Organizations may also offer training to prepare employees to telework and to create conditions under which teleworkers' job crafting behavior more easily translates into need satisfaction and positive outcomes.Social implicationsMany employees would prefer to work from home, at least partly, when the COVID-19 crisis is over. This model offers a way to facilitate a smooth transition into this work mode while ensuring work nonwork balance and performance.Originality/valueMost telework research takes a static approach to focus on the work–family interface. This study proffers a dynamic approach suggesting need satisfaction as the mechanism enabling one to combine work and domestic roles and delineating how feedback enables continuous adjustment in professional and personal roles.

The impact of job crafting and work engagement on academic librarians before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

The changes employees make to everyday tasks, relationships, and perceptions within work boundaries can be described as job crafting. Job crafting provides a mechanism to help employees focus on job redesign from the bottom-up, where the power rests with individual workers. This research employed a mixed methods approach using a convergent parallel design to examine job crafting behavior among academic librarians in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, work engagement was also examined as a potential moderating variable. Respondents self-selected participation (n = 1330) in completing an online survey that included questions from two established instruments (Job Crafting Questionnaire, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-9) and open-ended questions developed by the researcher. The study found that many academic librarians embodied crafting behaviors, especially task crafting. Moreover, overall job crafting and work engagement resulted in a strong positive relationship. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

How job crafting is related to the individual readiness to organizational change.

This article aims to examine the relationship between job crafting activities and employees' readiness to change. Confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were conducted on a representative sample of 500 employees. Sampling was carried out in a European country in a period strongly affected by COVID-19 to isolate the five dimensions of job crafting and their separate effects on employees' readiness to change. The findings show that the five dimensions of job crafting can be distinguished from each other and that they have differential effects on employees' readiness to change. Extending task crafting shows a positive relationship with employees' readiness to change while reducing task crafting showed no significant relationship. Surprisingly extending and reducing relationship crafting showed no significant relationship with readiness to change. Cognitive crafting was found to be significantly positively related to the dependent variable. This research contributes to the development of job crafting theory by providing empirical support that job crafting can be associated with readiness to change but that this relationship may vary across its dimensions. The results may also provide important conclusions for change leaders and HR professionals.

Impact of Job Crafting on Employee Performance While Working-From-Home

The current study is focused on Job crafting is a phenomenon that is spread widely all across the globe in different occupations including childcare educators, special education teachers and political advocacy employees. The job crafting process provides the employees with a major role of redesigning their jobs in such a way within certain limits that they can work satisfactorily while happily getting engaged in their jobsx. Job crafting is always done by the employees to feel comfortable in the environment and pays more attention to their job. Job crafting within certain limits can be done in three different ways. The Covid-19 epidemic has affected countries throughout the world, exposing hundreds of millions of people and claiming many lives. Governments in several nations have implemented lockdown measures, one of which is a Working from Home (WFH) policy, in which employees are not required to report to work every day. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Personal attributes and job resources as determinants of amount of work done under work-from-home: empirical study of Indian white-collar employees

PurposeEven after COVID-19 pandemic, several organizations intend extending work-from-home (WFH), to the extent of making it permanent for many. However, WFH's impact on productivity remains uncertain. Therefore, this paper aims to study personal and job factors determining the likelihood of amount of work done at home being same/more vis-à-vis office.Design/methodology/approachEmployees' basic psychological needs and job crafting tendencies;job-related aspects of task independence, technology resources and supervisory support;and several demographic factors are examined as determinants. Firth logistic regression analysis of data from 301 Indian white-collar employees is performed.FindingsDemographically, longer exposure to WFH, greater work experience and being a support function worker increased the likelihood of same/greater amount of work done at home. Being a woman or married reduced the likelihood, while being a manufacturing/services worker was non-significant. Among psychological needs, greater needs for autonomy and relatedness decreased and increased the likelihood of same/greater amount of work done at home, respectively. Regarding personal and job resources, job crafting to increase structural job resources and supervisor support increased the likelihood of same/greater amount of work done at home versus office.Originality/valueThis paper adds to the limited India-centric literature on WFH;uniquely examining influences of individual personal attributes on amount of work done by combining job demands-resources (JD-R) model and basic psychological needs theory.

Job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: The moderation effect of work engagement

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted a decline in hotel occupancy rates in the hospitality sector worldwide, including in Indonesia. Therefore, hotel management and workers need innovation to attract customers by crafting their jobs and developing original and creative ideas. Moreover, employees' work engagement will also support the emergence of innovative behavior. This study aimed to explore whether work engagement moderates the relationship between job crafting and innovative work behavior among hotel employees. This research was conducted at one of the four-star hotels in Medan, with 109 employees chosen with a total sampling technique to participate in this study. The innovative behavior scale, the job crafting scale, and the work engagement scale were used to collect the data, which were then processed using the moderated regression analysis method with Process Macro Software. The results show job crafting has a significant positive effect on innovative behavior, and work engagement moderates the effect of job crafting on innovative behavior. Increasing innovative behavior can be achieved by increasing job crafting and work engagement in the organization. The implication of this study may assist the hotel management in assessing its employees and then implementing training on job crafting and work engagement to improve innovative behavior.

Job Crafting: A Challenge to Promote Decent Work for Vulnerable Workers.

In recent years, the decent work agenda has called upon vocational psychologists to advance psychological research and intervention to promote work as a human right. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic is having disproportionate consequences on vulnerable workers, such as unemployment and underemployment, highlighting the need to enhance access to decent work for these workers. As a response, the present perspective article advances job crafting as a promising way to shape decent work for marginalized workers. To this end, the article deals with decent work and job crafting, starting with the definition of decent work according to the psychology of working theory (PWT) and examining the evolution of the construct of job crafting. Subsequently, the literature on job crafting is discussed, focusing on variables related to the PWT model of decent work and their effect on vulnerable workers. Finally, possibilities for further research and intervention aimed at promoting decent work through job crafting are discussed.

Emergent organizing in crisis: US nurses' sensemaking and job crafting during COVID-19

Crisis situations may render some roles meaningless or modify the meanings of existing roles. In general, employees participate in job crafting to alter or redefine their tasks and relationships to enhance their meaningfulness. Drawing on Weick's sensemaking theory, this article explores how nurses working directly with COVID-19 patients participate in job crafting amid a pandemic crisis. It proposes an iterative conceptual framework in which sensemaking via the cycle of enactment, selection, and retention informs job crafting, thus contributing to emergent organizing. This enactment of emergent organizing provides fodder for further sensemaking, which highlights the symbiotic relationship between sensemaking and job crafting. Practically speaking, in order to facilitate sensemaking, job crafting, and organizing, management must acknowledge and impart flexibility, and must be open to impromptu thinking by nurses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Employees' fear at work, job crafting, and work engagement on a daily basis: The case for fear of COVID-19.

In the present study, we seek to understand how public sector employees that go to work to perform essential duties for the society and the economy cope with the fear of COVID-19 and maintain their motivation, energy, and enthusiasm for their work. We hypothesized that because employees are motivated to protect their health, an increase in daily fear of COVID-19 would be related to a daily increase in coping behaviors in the form of job crafting, which would consequently be related to employees' daily motivation. Data were based on 64 tenured employees working in public service organizations during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2021), who completed a quantitative diary for five consecutive workdays (N = 320 occasions). Results from multilevel analysis indicated that fear of COVID-19 had an indirect effect on work engagement through only one dimension of job crafting, seeking job resources. The study contributes to the ongoing theoretical extension of the beneficial role of job crafting by suggesting seeking social resources as an effective coping strategy for fear of COVID-19.

Effective employee strategies for remote working: An online self-training intervention

This paper examines whether employees' strategies to recognize (through self-recognition) and regulate (through job crafting, work-family management, and recovery) their internal and external demands and resources help them retain their well-being and performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also examines whether an online self-training intervention can stimulate the use of these strategies. A randomized control trial with a waitlist control group and pre-post measure (N intervention group = 62, N control group = 77) was executed, consisting of four modules with videos, exercises, and three assignments. Participants of the intervention group reported improved self-recognition (noticing, self-focused emotional intelligence), job crafting (seeking resources and challenges), recovery (psychological detachment and relaxation), and reduced work-family conflict. Moreover, the intervention group reported reduced fatigue and increased happiness with life and task performance after the intervention. Improvements in self-focused emotional intelligence, relaxation, and reduced work-family conflict could explain the progress of these distal outcomes. This study reveals the strategies that can help employees to maintain high levels of well-being and performance while working from home and how to improve them using an evidence-based self-training intervention.

How COVID-19 Perceived Risk Causes Turnover Intention Among Chinese Flight Attendants: A Moderated Mediation Model.

Purpose: This study examined the influencing mechanism and boundary conditions underlying the relation between COVID-19 perceived risk and flight attendants' turnover intention by investigating the mediating role of job insecurity and the moderating effect of job crafting. Methods:  A two-wave survey was conducted with 240 Chinese flight attendants. We used structural equation modeling to test the moderated mediation model. Results: The results indicated that perceived risk of COVID-19 positively affected flight attendants' job insecurity and turnover intention. Moreover, job insecurity plays a fully mediating role in the relationship between perceived risk and turnover intention. Furthermore, the mediating role of job insecurity was moderated by job crafting; for higher levels of job crafting (opposed to low), the effect of job insecurity on turnover intention was significantly weaker. Conclusion:  Our findings indicate that dissipating job insecurity and increasing job crafting behavior are critical to employees' work-related attitudes and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Proactively Seeking Challenges for Job Satisfaction: The Interplay of Psychological Ownership Among IT Sector Professionals

The coronavirus pandemic has put the spotlight on employee happiness and well-being. Employees’ job satisfaction in a post-COVID-19 scenario is a vital concern for academics and organizations. It is a crucial research question to decipher if employees can proactively rise to challenging job demands and achieve job satisfaction. Also, though the role of job crafting has been studied as an antecedent of job satisfaction, it has not been examined in alliance with job-based psychological ownership (PO). Taking note of this, this study examines the mediating role of job-based PO between seeking challenging job demands (SCJD) and job satisfaction (JS). The study contributes to the growing understanding of post-pandemic employee JS. It provides preliminary empirical evidence of the enabling roles of job-based PO and proactive job crafting in achieving JS. Data for the study were collected from Information Technology (IT) and IT enabled Services (ITeS) sector employees in India using online questionnaires. One hundred eighty-four solicited responses were included in the data analysis and analysed using SPSS and AMOS. Results establish that employees SCJD experience higher job satisfaction. The mediating effect of PO on the association between SCJD and JS has been found. The results have both practical and theoretical implications. This study provides evidence of the beneficiary aspect of proactive employee behaviour. Managers can adopt mechanisms to enable job crafting and ownership. JS can be enhanced by raising the levels of PO and proactive crafting undertaken by SCJD to further learning opportunities at work. Limitations of the study have been discussed. © 2022 Management Development Institute.

Teachers' Well-Being Forced to Work from Home Due to COVID-19 Pandemic: Work Passion as a Mediator.

BACKGROUND: This study examines the relationship between perceived demands (workload and organizational constraints) of teachers' work during the online period of schooling during the COVID-19 crisis and well-being (emotions, engagement, and job crafting), with work passion as a mediator. METHODS: The survey was carried out on a sample of 383 teachers during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Scale of Organizational Constraints and the Workload Scale, the Passion Scale adapted for work, the Job Crafting Questionnaire, the Utrecht Scale of Work Engagement, and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience was used. RESULTS: Harmonious passion strengthened the positive relationships between workload and organizational constraints and job crafting and weakened the negative relationship with positive emotions and the positive one with negative emotions. The positive relationship between workload and engagement has been strengthened by harmonious passion. The negative relationship between organizational constraints and engagement became positive and weaker. Relationships between variables were weakened, i.e., workload and engagement, organizational constraints and job crafting, or strengthened, i.e., organizational constraints and engagement, by an obsessive passion. In tested models, obsessive passion has the opposite effect and is weaker than harmonious passion. CONCLUSION: The structural equation modeling (SEM) confirmed that work passion, mainly harmonious, is a mechanism explaining the relationship between the demands of forced work from home with teachers' well-being.

Rethinking work: How approach and avoidance features of cognitive crafting are linked with job crafting behaviors and work engagement

Responding to the call for more research on cognitive crafting, this study focuses on employees' reframing of their job characteristics to assign higher importance to job resources and downplay the relevance of costly job demands. Furthermore, it examines how these proactive cognitive strategies are embedded in an overall job crafting process, including both cognitive and behavioral aspects, and linked with work engagement. Preliminary results (n = 247) support the conceptualization of cognitive crafting encompassing approach and avoidance aspects targeting resources and demands, respectively. Moreover, three-wave data (n = 84) show that employees' cognitive efforts to highlight the centrality of job resources influence work engagement over time. Importantly, proactively organizing work leads to higher work engagement by prompting cognitive reframing of the relevance of job resources as central to one's work. Differently, cognitive efforts to downplay the relevance of hindering job demands are unrelated to following proactive behaviors and work engagement.

Understanding How Student Support Practitioners Navigated Ideal Worker Norms During COVID-19: The Role of Job-Crafting

Student support practitioners (SSPs) play a key role in supporting at-promise (low-income, first-generation college, and/or racially minoritized) students in higher education. However, delivering such support can lead to stress and burnout when practitioners do not receive commensurate support and flexibility to do their jobs. In this study, we examined how SSPs supported students while fulfilling their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected during 2020 to 2021 as part of a longitudinal study of a comprehensive college transition program at three midwestern universities, we examine how SSPs engaged in job crafting during the pandemic. Our findings reveal that job crafting largely perpetuated and expanded ideal worker norms during the pandemic. Implications from this research suggest the need to consider how to institutionally support job crafting in ways that center the needs of SSPs. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of American Behavioral Scientist is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Advantages of and Barriers to Crafting New Technology in Healthcare Organizations: A Qualitative Study in the COVID-19 Context.

Nursing professionals are constantly required to adapt to technological changes, and especially so in the wake of COVID-19, which has prompted the development of new digital tools. A new and specific form of job crafting in relation to new technology has recently emerged in the literature; that is, adoption job crafting. However, little is known about this specific form of job crafting, especially within the pandemic context. We aim, in this study, to explore the advantages of and barriers to adoption job crafting. We used NVivo software to analyze 42 semi-structured interviews conducted during COVID-19. Our findings revealed that nurses had proactive and positive attitudes toward new technology (adoption job crafting) to enhance efficiency, sustainability, well-being, virtual teamwork, communication, and knowledge sharing. We also identified many barriers to adoption job crafting due to several organizational obstacles, such as the lack of human resource management practices, especially training, and the characteristics of the technology used. We contribute to the literature by documenting innovative cases of and barriers to adoption job crafting, which have not been explored before. These findings stress the necessity to adopt human resources practices, especially training, to foster positive job crafting among nurses and safeguard their adaptive expertise.

Mediation of work engagement towards productive behaviour in remote work environments during pandemic: testing the job demands and resources model in Japan

Based on the job demands and resources model, this study assumes that remote work, supervisory behaviours and employee job crafting are leveraged by work engagement to increase individual goal attainment. This mediating relationship was tested using survey data collected from 500 Japanese remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multivariate hierarchical regression analyses were conducted separately by two groups: workers who started remote work before the pandemic and those who started after. Among the post-COVID-19 remote workers, employees' goal attainment was improved by discretionary task crafting but was directly decreased by relational crafting. Furthermore, cognitive crafting increased goal attainment partially through the mediation of work engagement. Among the pre-COVID-19 remote workers, it was only frequency of remote work that influenced goal attainment.

Pandemics related-demands upon managers and job crafting in the production sector in Poland

Managers' behaviour is an important determinant of operational performance of manufacturing companies as it is crucial for workforce management. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, this group of workers is particularly exposed to high occupational overload, so there is a need to focus on the ways they can proactively activate personal resources to deal with crisis demands. Proactivity and job crafting are among the key elements ensuring the efficient and effective functioning of managers in conditions of high demands. Drawing on the job demands-resources theory (JD-R), this study investigates how distinct new demands upon managers and managers' organizational identification impact on the managers' job crafting. Data were collected during pandemics' outburst using the computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) with 147 middle and senior managers from manufacturing companies in Poland, while SEM used to test hypothesized research model. The results show that COVID-19 hindering demands related to general overload increase job crafting only when managers possess high level of organizational identification, while challenging demands connected to information and communications technology use directly leverage job crafting. The findings guide manufacturers that they should be very careful in applying hindering demands in unprecedented environmental changes and always focus on managers' additional personal resources in that context. There should be also more awareness of different types of excessive demands and different psychological mechanism they trigger.