Understanding how Job crafting can enhance Employee Engagement in Light of The Self-Determination Theory & The Job Characteristics Model of Job design

The past few years have witnessed lots of challenges and changes that have dramatically disrupted the workplace as well as employees’ perspectives about their roles and contribution as vital members of any organization. Workplace disruption is driven by the power of technology that contributed a lot to forming what can be named the knowledge economy while enhancing connectedness and communication beyond our imagination, uncovering a greater need for autonomy at work. Moreover, with a new powerful generation (Gen. Z) is entering the workplace amid the notion of the aging population, today’s workplace became characterized by the presence of three or four generations working together with diverse and different expectations, needs, capabilities, and perspectives, turning today’s workplace into a more agile, egalitarian version that promotes collegiality rather than hierarchy and control. All these factors and more, bolstered with the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic has accelerated lots of changes and presented lots of unprecedented challenges such as remote management and leadership, making employee engagement one of the key buzz words of today’s workplace.  

Despite the aforementioned challenges and changes, and light of the principles of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and guided with the job characteristics model, effective techniques and approaches such as Job crafting might play an important role in boosting and enhancing employee engagement, even though some limitations might be explored further. 

“Amongst the terms that have been used to describe employee engagement are, on the one hand, positive, fulfilling, a work-related state of mind characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption; or on the other as energetic involvement with fulfilling activities that enhance the person’s sense of professional efficacy” (Maslach and Leither 1997; Schaufeli and Bakker 2004; Chaufeli et al. 2006; Shuck and Wollard 2010 as cited in Turner, 2019, p. 31). According to Souders (2020), employee engagement can be explained as the state of flow, being highly immersed and absorbed at work in a way that fuels your professional achievement and contributes to your growth and happiness.

Employee engagement can be explained through the self-determination theory SDT that according to Meyer, John P, & Gagnè, Maryléne. (2008), comprises two key elements or types of motivation, the intrinsic motivation that is driven by one’s own internal desire and passion (autonomous regulation) and extrinsic motivation that embraces the concept of instrumentality or in another term can be described as external or controlled regulation, by which punishment and reward play an important role in influencing one’s behaviour. Moreover according to Meyer, John P, & Gagnè, Maryléne. (2008) “The behavioural outcomes found to be associated with autonomous regulation correspond with what they described as behavioural engagement” emphasizing the importance of autonomy and intrinsic motivation in boosting engagement.

“According to self-determination theory, people have three innate psychological needs, namely the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness” (Deci & Ryan, 2000 as cited in Bakker & Oerlemans, 2019, p. 420), emphasizing the importance of autonomy and competence as one of the employee’s key psychological needs towards fulfillment and satisfaction.

In light of the aforementioned correlation between employee engagement and autonomous regulation, job crating as one of the most prominent and interesting HR practices can be defined according to Wrzeniewski and Dutton (2001) as cited in (De DEVOTTO, RITA P., 2020, p. 3) “Job crafting encompasses employees’ actions to physically or cognitively alter tasks and relationships at work in order to align them with their values, positive strengths (e.g., skills, attributes, and talents) and passions “

As emanating from the above definitions and explanation, autonomous regulation as expressed in autonomy and having more control over one’s job responsibilities might be positively correlated with a higher level of employee engagement, which can be achieved by practicing job crafting to allow leeway for employees to have control over designing their roles and contribution to resonate better with their individual strengths and passion. Moreover, the job crafting practice corresponds also to the enlightening job characteristics model (JCM) from Hackman and Odham and based on the work by Turner and Lawrence (1965) as cited in (Blanz, Mathias, 2017) that predicts key important work aspects such job satisfaction and work performance might be affected by five job characteristics such as skill variety, skill identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback).

The JCM emphasizes the importance of job design in boosting job satisfaction and performance which can be considered highly related to work engagement, whilst at the same time the five job characteristics correspond to intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation which might be affected by other factors such as rewards and pay. The JCM's five characteristics especially autonomy, skill identity, and task significance explain how the job crafting practice might play a transformative role in enhancing job satisfaction and consequently impact employee engagement positively towards sustaining performance and personal growth.

Albeit the strong supported positive correlation between job crafting practices, autonomy, job satisfaction, and engagement, it’s still unclear how job crafting can influence prescribed entry-level jobs, critical roles, or highly technical roles posing several questions that might need further exploration (i.e., how fresh graduates and unexperienced employees can make use of the job crafting technique, how managers can deal with undesirable tasks when everyone takes it out of his/her job description, how responsibilities and tasks can be distributed among team members, and more importantly is it possible that potential conflicts among team members due to refusing some undesirable tasks would negatively influence work engagement?).

Job crafting plays an exceedingly important role to allow greater leeway of autonomy and consequently fulfill essential psychological innate needs towards making jobs more meaningful and more connected to employee’s strengths and passion, resulting in boosting employee engagement. However, further exploration of how job crafting would affect team cohesiveness and relationships along with other operational elements is needed to support this argument across different types and levels of jobs.

References:

Bakker, Arnold B, & Oerlemans, Wido G.M. (2019). Daily job crafting and momentary work engagement: A self-determination and self-regulation perspective. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 112, 417-430.

Blanz, Mathias. (2017). Employees' Job Satisfaction: A Test of the Job Characteristics Model Among Social Work Practitioners. Journal of Evidence-informed Social Work, 14(1), 35-50.

 De DEVOTTO, RITA P. (2020). THE ROLE OF JOB CRAFTING ON THE PROMOTION OF FLOW AND WELLBEING. Revista De Administração Mackenzie, 21(1), 1-25.

Meyer, John P, & Gagnè, Maryléne. (2008). Employee Engagement From a Self-Determination Theory Perspective. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1(1), 60-62.

Souders, B. M. (2020, October 12). Flow at Work: The Science of Engagement and Optimal Performance. PositivePsychology.Com. https://positivepsychology.com/flow-at-work/

Tavčar, Maša. (2019). Flow at Work, Work Satisfaction and Big Five Personality Traits among Slovenian Primary School Teachers. Management (18544223), 14(2), 151-164.

Turner, P. (2019). Employee Engagement in Contemporary Organizations: Maintaining High Productivity and Sustained Competitiveness (1st ed. 2020 ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.