Antecedents and consequences of job crafting by school teachers

Abstract

The effects of facilitating factors within a school, such as leadership style and psychological empowerment, on job crafting behavior of teachers were explored. Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) defined job crafting as employee-initiated actions that modify the task or relational boundaries of their work to make it more meaningful. Job crafting behavior has been variously linked to increase in personal meaningfulness of work and building of favorable work identities; thus, it was hypothesized that those who engage in job crafting will likely feel less alienated, that is, show lower levels of feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness and social isolation (Seeman, 1959). Given that job crafting has been found to be positively correlated with affective organizational commitment (Ghitulescu, 2007; Kirkendall, 2013) it was hypothesized that work alienation will mediate the effect of job crafting on affective organizational commitment. Job crafting was operationalized as the attempt of the teacher to increase structural and social resources and decrease hindering demands (Tims, Bakker & Derks, 2012). Six hundred and twenty-four teachers working in 33 schools were administered a survey comprising established measures of psychological empowerment, empowering leadership, job crafting, work alienation and affective organizational commitment. Path analysis of the specified model showed that psychological empowerment partially mediated the effect of empowering leadership on proactively increasing structural resources while alienation partially mediated the effect of increasing structural resources on affective organizational commitment. The study discusses the research and practical implications of the findings.