Maintaining job crafting over time: joint effect of autonomy and career support from family and friends

A dual-pathway model for examining the effects of customer mistreatment on an employee's customer-directed counterproductive work behavior: can job autonomy make a difference?

Purpose

This research examined how customer mistreatment activates individual customer-directed counterproductive work behavior (CWBC) by investigating the mediating roles of negative work reflection and negative affect. It also explored whether job autonomy buffers the negative impact of customer mistreatment on CWBC.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors tested their predictions using an experience-sample method with a sample of data from 79 service workers across eight days. A multilevel structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The authors found that negative work reflection and negative affect mediated the association between customer mistreatment and CWBC. In addition, job autonomy moderated the indirect impact of daily customer mistreatment on employees' CWBC through negative work reflection and negative affect.

Research limitations/implications

There are some concerns about a common method because all of the study variables were self-reported. Moreover, the study sample consisted of participants recruited exclusively from China, thus limiting this research's generality.

Practical implications

To eliminate the detrimental impact of customer mistreatment, supervisors can strive to improve the autonomy of those who interact with customers frequently to reduce their CWBC.

Originality/value

This study offers an integrative view to explain why service workers engage in CWBC when suffering customer mistreatment by testing the mediating mechanisms of negative reflection and negative affect in the association between daily customer mistreatment and CWBC. Second, the authors have broadened the study of customer mistreatment by introducing job autonomy as a critical condition, eliminating the indirect association between customer mistreatment and CWBC.

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.

Leader secure-base support and organizational learning culture: synergetic effects on employee state promotion focus and approach job crafting

Purpose

Leader secure-base support, consisting of leader availability, noninterference and encouragement of growth, has important implications for stimulating employee proactivity. This study is aimed at examining whether, why and when leader secure-base support may motivate employees to engage in approach job crafting behavior. Drawing upon regulatory focus theory, we propose leader secure-base support is positively associated with employee approach job crafting via employee state promotion focus. Based on cue consistency theory, we further examine the moderating role of organizational learning culture in the associations of leader secure-base support with employee state promotion focus and subsequent approach job crafting.

Design/methodology/approach

Two-wave data were collected from 281 Chinese workers. Path analyses with Mplus 7 were conducted to test the hypotheses.

Findings

As predicted, we found that leader secure-base support was positively related to employee state promotion focus and, in turn, facilitated employee approach job crafting. Moreover, organizational learning culture accentuated the impact of leader secure-base support on employee job crafting process.

Originality/value

This study is the first to examine the influence of leader secure-base support on employee job crafting. It also identifies a boundary condition for such an influence.