Workers as Workplace Architects: How Business Coaching can help us become Masters in Workplace Design
Did you know that you are a workplace architect? Yes, you, who is reading this post! The concept we unpack today and how business coaching might help you becoming a master architect of your work is job crafting. Job crafting is not a fuzzy buzzword but is based on rigorous empirical research accumulated over years. First, let’s unpack the concept of job crafting a little bit more.
Becoming a Workplace Architect through Job Crafting
When we think about job crafting, it’s about making changes to your job (e.g., the tasks you are working on, the relationships at work, or even how you think about the work you do) with the aim of improving your own work design. Job crafting has several important characteristics or key elements you should be aware of:
You are at the centre – You craft your job to create change in your own work
Job crafting is intentional – You proactively drive it
You craft a noticeable change between your current and future work
The changes that occur through job crafting last – they are not temporary
The focus of job crafting is around your role and the work you do
Job crafting is applied in jobs with a clear job description and/ or specified tasks
You don’t have to seek formal approval – it’s in the zone of acceptance from your line manager/ colleagues
Job crafting aims to change the intrinsic characteristics of your work, not extrinsic aspects such as pay or status
These are considered as the defining ‘essence’ of job crafting and can be handy when you think about changing aspects of your job. It’s a bit like a checklist to determine whether what you change truly falls in the job crafting space or not. Sounds fancy, right? So let’s dive a bit into the structure of job crafting. First, you can use job crafting to either enrich/ expand your work or reduce/ limit certain aspects of it. Second, job crafting can either focus on how you reframe or view your job, work-related tasks, or emotions at work (i.e., cognitive crafting) or you can change your specific workplace-related behaviours (i.e., behaviour crafting). Lastly, your specific job crafting actions can either focus on changing your job resources or job demands. For example, you can enrol into a course or development program at work to develop your work-related skills. This would be considered approach crafting with a specific behaviour you show to increase your available job resources (e.g., increase in knowledge/skills). Another example would be to avoid or delay specific unwanted work-related tasks to reduce workload during the day. This would be considered avoidance crafting with a specific behaviour to reduce job demands. A way of cognitive crafting would be to reframe the job or tasks you do (e.g., from ‘I’m drowning in admin work’ to ‘This work creates transparency and helps me to spot where processes need improvement’). This is cognitive approach crafting to gain job resources – so you reframe or rethink the work you do. So, you can see that with job crafting, you step into the role of an active creator and designer of your work.
How does Job Crafting influence my Work?
Over the last two decades, plenty of studies have examined the relationships between certain types of job crafting and specific work-related outcomes such as motivation, performance, or mental well-being at work. Studies show that what’s generally considered as approach crafting (i.e., you do proactive steps to increase your job resources or increase job demands you find particularly challenging) shows benefits to your mental well-being at work such as increased work engagement and is associated with reduced burnout, job strain, and depression. Approach crafting has also been shown to boost your learning opportunities at work and your career progression, career satisfaction, and even objective promotions. It’s important to note that these effects depend a bit on whether approach crafting actions focus on job resources (e.g., seeking help from a colleague when stuck with a problem at work) or job demands (e.g., taking on more challenging tasks at work). For example, approach demands crafting strategies tend to show more stable long-term positive associations with work engagement, whereas approach job resources crafting seems to be more short-lived improvements while longer term benefits might not always emerge. Contrary to the positive benefits of approach crafting, the evidence around avoidance crafting is a bit more mixed. Especially avoidance demands crafting (e.g., postponing boring tasks, or not doing them at all) seems to be related to reductions in one’s job satisfaction, work engagement, and can even increase exhaustion if done over longer periods of time. In general, avoidance crafting approaches are considered to have detrimental effects on individual performance and can even spill over to co-workers with increases in conflict and overall higher levels of workload. This suggests that you might be unsuccessful in reducing your job demands and not be able to increase your job resources when you focus your efforts on avoidance crafting. In short, it does matter which kinds of job crafting strategies you engage in, as the associations with work-related outcomes do vary depending on the type of job crafting activity.
What about the Role of Business Coaching in helping me become a Workplace Architect?
It’s important to note that job crafting never happens in a vacuum and work environments are constantly changing, which can make it sometimes somewhat challenging to implement new behaviours or reframe the tasks you are working on. To support navigating through this, coaching can be considered as a quite helpful setting to promote and facilitate individual job crafting efforts. For example, coaching can provide the room and space for exploration and self-insight on how to overcome work-related barriers or obstacles that limit or restrict job crafting efforts. Moreover, there seems to be some conceptual overlap between job crafting and coaching. For example, both aim to increase job satisfaction, well-being and performance at work, have a particular focus on employee strengths, and involve a certain degree of goal setting and goal achievement. A professional coaching setting is considered to increase the efficacy of individual crafting approaches and can help clients to identify counterproductive work-related behaviours or cognitions. Coaching provides clients with additional support to engage or (re-)discover useful and context-specific job crafting behaviours or cognitions through self-reflective processes. Thus, coaching can be considered as a ‘meta-intervention’ approach in which specific job crafting techniques can be explored and reflected on.
Wrap up
Overall, we can say that:
Job crafting can help you to become a proactive designer of your work – a Workplace Architect
While lots of different types of job crafting exist, approach job crafting appears to show a lot of benefits for your mental well-being, motivation, and job performance
Business coaching settings can provide a professional space to explore and engage in specific job crafting behaviours and help you to overcome potential implementation barriers
References:
Harju, L. K., Hakanen, J. J., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2016). Can job crafting reduce job boredom and increase work engagement? A three-year cross-lagged panel study. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 95–96, 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2016.07.001
Lichtenthaler, P. W., & Fischbach, A. (2016). The conceptualization and measurement of job crafting: Validation of a German version of the job crafting scale. Zeitschrift Fur Arbeits- Und Organisationspsychologie, 60(4), 173–186. https://doi.org/10.1026/0932-4089/a000219
Lopper, E., Horstmann, K. T., & Hoppe, A. (2024). The Approach‐Avoidance Job Crafting Scale: Development and validation of a measurement of the hierarchical structure of job crafting. Applied Psychology, 73(1), 93–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12466
Petrou, P., Demerouti, E., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2015). Job crafting in changing organizations: Antecedents and implications for exhaustion and performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 20(4), 470–480. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039003
Rudolph, C. W., Katz, I. M., Lavigne, K. N., & Zacher, H. (2017). Job crafting: A meta-analysis of relationships with individual differences, job characteristics, and work outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 102(314), 112–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2017.05.008
Silapurem, L., Slemp, G. R., & Jarden, A. (2021). Encouraging Job Crafting through a Coaching Partnership. In W.-A. Smith, I. Boniwell, & S. Green (Eds.), Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace (pp. 417–436). Springer.
Tims, M., Bakker, A. B., & Derks, D. (2012). Development and validation of the job crafting scale. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 80(1), 173–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2011.05.009
Zhang, F., & Parker, S. K. (2019). Reorienting job crafting research: A hierarchical structure of job crafting concepts and integrative review. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40(2), 126–146. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2332