Staying engaged through job crafting : the role of job insecurity

Purpose: Organizational change could bring forth a state of high uncertainty and flux in the workplace, yet it could offer opportunities for employees to craft their own jobs. The present study aims to investigate how engaged employees conserve their own engagement through job crafting in an uncertain context (high job insecurity). Design/Methodology: 424 employees’ data from several companies were collected twice with a three-month interval. Structural equation modeling and moderated multiple regression were used to test our hypothesis. Results: Baseline work engagement predicted future work engagement that resulted from an increase in both physical and relational job crafting. The positive relationship between baseline work engagement and the increase in relational job crafting was stronger when job insecurity was high. Limitations: The cross-cultural generalizability of the findings needs to be examined by further studies in other cultures. Second, future studies can also explore how individual difference variables (e.g. fatalism, power distance) influence the process of job crafting. Research/Practical Implications: We conclude that engaged employees could craft their own work in both physical and relational way in order to keep them staying engaged. Moreover, under a context of high job insecurity, engaged employees are inclined to expand more relational aspect of the job, which corroborates previous findings that Chinese people are more likely to place strong emphasis on good relationships in the workplace particularly when they feel their jobs are insecure. Originality/Value: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese study investigating the underlying job crafting process whereby individuals protect and maintain their engagement during a high uncertain context