Relational job crafting: Exploring the role of employee motives with a weekly diary study

In this weekly diary study, we integrated research on job crafting to explore the associations between expansion and contraction oriented relational job crafting (RJC), work engagement and manager-rated employee behaviors (work performance and voice). Furthermore, we investigated cross level moderations of prosocial and impression management motives on our proposed associations. We tested our hypotheses with matched data collected over seven weeks in Istanbul, Turkey. The results from multilevel analyses revealed that a) expansion oriented RJC is positively related with work performance and voice via work engagement while b) contraction oriented RJC is negatively related with work performance and voice via work engagement, all measured at the week level. Furthermore, impression management motives of employees moderated the association between expansion oriented RJC and work engagement in that this positive association is stronger for employees low on impression management motives. Our results contribute to job crafting research in two ways. First, it focuses on RJC and discusses how and why the two opposite types of RJC (expansion versus contraction oriented) impact on work engagement and employees’ key outcomes in the way they do. This addresses the question “is there a dark side to job crafting?” Second, it focuses on the importance of context and integrates two motives relevant to understand how RJC unfolds, thereby taking a step to address questions for whom (i.e., what kinds of employees), RJC is more effective and translates into enhanced (vs deteriorated) work outcomes. Moreover, our use of a weekly within-person design adds to a recently growing research stream emphasizing the dynamic nature of job crafting.