Regular versus cutback-related change: the role of employee job crafting in organizational change contexts of different nature

The present study addresses how job characteristics (e.g., autonomy, workload, and their interaction) relate to employee job crafting (i.e., seeking resources, seeking challenges, and reducing demands), and whether job crafting relates to employee work-related well-being (i.e., work engagement and exhaustion) across 2 distinct organizational change contexts: a context of threatening, cutback-related change (i.e., due to the financial recession in Greece) and a context of regular change (i.e., due to reorganization in the Netherlands). In both contexts, workload related positively to seeking resources when job autonomy was low, suggesting that employees seek resources to deal with the demanding context of organizational change. Furthermore, seeking resources and seeking challenges were generally associated with better work-related well-being, while reducing demands related positively to employee exhaustion only in the context of regular change (i.e., Dutch sample). Promising avenues for future research are discussed and practical recommendations are proposed to managers who deal with excessive (regular or cutback-related) organizational change.