How Public Managers Craft their Job? A Proposal for a Job Crafting Intervention in the Public Sector

Studies on job crafting, a bottom-up approach to individual job redesign, have been growing steadily over the last years given the expected positive impact it has on many individual- and organizational-level outcomes. Drawing on the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation Behavior (COM-B) model, we propose an intervention study and the results of a pilot study among public-sector managers. This research may provide interesting insights into how job crafting is shaped within a highly formalized workplace context, as it has been demonstrated that such a context may prevent people from crafting their job and induce people to have more passive behavior at work. In particular, the pilot study results emphasize the role of relational crafting and shed new light on how job crafting occurs in the public sector.