10 January 2025
Bilbao Campus
Job Crafting and Work Engagement: The Mediating Role of Work Meaning is the title of a study conducted by a team from the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Deusto that establishes that the positive relationship between job crafting and life satisfaction is explained by the meaning of work. But what is job crafting? According to the Health Sciences team, Department of Psychology, formed by Alejandro Amillano, Onintze López de Letona Ibáñez, Silvia Martínez-Rodríguez and María Carrasco, job crafting is an active behavior of working people to introduce changes in their tasks and in their relationships with the work environment.
Job crafting is a technique to refocus the job itself and proactively adjust and align it better with your expectations, goals, interests, values, needs, strengths and personal skills. By taking more control over the design of the job, people can derive more meaning from it. To achieve this, business and team leaders need to facilitate the process by providing feedback and flexibility.
New generations: Millennials and Generation Z
Times are changing and mentalities and organizations are evolving. Factors such as security, salary and career development options are no longer the only ones valued. Now, people, especially the new generations (millennials and generation Z), are looking for purpose and flexibility in the workplace. The theory of the job crafting method says that this redesign of the workplace to the way the employee is and works makes people more motivated, satisfied and committed to the company. It also benefits organizations, since by increasing the engagement of workers, productivity increases and they are more attractive to retain and attract talent.
The study conducted by the Health Sciences team at the University of Deusto goes a step further and establishes that when people find purpose and meaning in their work, this is reflected in their satisfaction with life. Published in the academic journal Springer Nature, the study Job Crafting and Work Engagement: The Mediating Role of Work Meaning aims to analyze how work meaning explains the relationship between job crafting and life satisfaction.
To do so, they studied 785 employees (50.2% women) with an average age of 41.41 years. They used the Job Crafting Questionnaire (JCQ), the Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI) and the Satisfaction with Life (SWL) as validated instruments to measure the study variables. After controlling for age, gender, weekly working hours and length of service in the same company, a significant positive association of Job Crafting with life satisfaction was found. In addition, mediation analysis using PROCESS revealed that job meaning mediated this relationship. The results of this study highlight the role of job crafting and work meaning, and in general of caring for well-being at work, in the overall life satisfaction of working people.
The role of companies in mental health
In their study, the team from the Psychology Department of the School of Health Sciences includes a multitude of references to all the literature on previous studies and research on job crafting. From the reference to Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001 - the concept of job crafting emerged in 2001 by Amy Wrzesniewski, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management - to some of the most recent studies that already provide some evidence of the potential relationship with life satisfaction by the authors Duarte-Lores et al., 2023; Grueso-Hinestroza et al., 2022; Shilo-Levin et al., 2021; William & Novanto, 2023.
The team formed by Alejandro Amillano, Onintze López de Letona Ibáñez, Silvia Martínez-Rodríguez and María Carrasco finally concludes that “in a global context in which mental health is seriously threatened, organizations can play a crucial role in promoting people's well-being”. Taking into account the path opened by other research, this study by the University of Deusto “provides some of the first empirical data in favor of the potential of job crafting to promote people's life satisfaction through the meaning of work”.
Full study here.
