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What Is Job Crafting?
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What Is Job Crafting?


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9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Overview
  • Concrete Examples

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Poll after poll suggests that a large number of employees feel disengaged at work. But instead of blaming your organizational culture or boss, why not take steps to make your job more meaningful and interesting? Job crafting is a process that encourages you to do just that. In Positive Psychology, Catherine Moore offers a succinct overview of what job crafting entails – including links to research studies and worksheets. It’s an informative read for human resources professionals and offers potentially life-changing tools to employees who want their job to be more than a paycheck. 

Summary

Through job crafting, you can proactively shape and assign meaning to your tasks.

Unlike job design, which is a top-down approach of defining job functions, job crafting is an employee-driven effort to shape and assign meaning to a given role. Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, who coined the term in 2001, distinguished between three different types of job crafting:

  1. Task crafting – Employees mold work tasks to reflect their individual interests and skills. This may involve putting more time and effort into the tasks they particularly enjoy or that present learning opportunities.

About the Author

Catherine Moore is a psychologist, organizational development facilitator and HR manager.


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