The art of reinventing your job: A meta-synthesis of job crafting qualitative research

Employees do not passively undergo their jobs. Rather, they take steps to modify job characteristics based on their features and motivations. Job crafting (JC) has been defined as the process of “shaping the task boundaries of the job (either physically or cognitively), the relational boundaries of the job, or both” (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001, p. 179) in order to achieve meaningfulness of work (Tims, Derks & Bakker, 2016) and superior performance (Berg, Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2010). The growing interest around this topic has led to an increase of studies aiming to synthesizing JC research in order to provide a general picture of the relations between JC and a variety of individual, job characteristics, and work outcomes differences. However, the meta-analyses on the subject (Rudolph, Katz, Lavigne & Zacher, 2017; Wang, Demerouti & Bakker, 2016) are systematically excluding qualitative studies. This sounds a bit inconsistent within this field, since the origins of the JC research stream are qualitative by nature and the topic has been extensively investigated through qualitative research (Tims & Bakker, 2010). Indeed, research on JC has been primarily based on a qualitative approach and only later quantitative measures have been developed and applied (Nielsen & Abildgaard, 2012). With few exceptions, in the first ten years the vast majority of JC research has been qualitative or theoretical (Slemp & Vella-Brodrick, 2013). The qualitative approach was preferred since it was considered the best methodology in order to identify workers’ hidden attempts to craft their job (Lyons, 2008) or participate in organizational change (Petrou, Demerouti, Peeters, Schaufeli & Hetland, 2012). Indeed, qualitative approach has been seen as the best method to unravel JC behaviours (Berg, Grant & Johnson, 2010) and to build theory in this field (Dvorak, 2014). In order to close the research gap related to systematising qualitative evidence about JC, this study is based on a meta-synthesis of JC qualitative research (Hoon, 2013) whose purpose is to assist theory building about how it occurs.