Types of Job Crafting

Overview

On this page, we will discuss:

What Are the Four Types of Job Crafting?

There are various skills you can apply in job crafting:

  • task crafting,
  • relational crafting,
  • cognitive crafting, and
  • skill crafting (recently documented by Bindl et al., 2019).

Comparison of Types of Job Crafting

Refer to the table below for a comparison of the four types of job crafting.

Table: Four Types of Job Crafting
Task crafting illustration: person hiking in the mountains to get to a destination

Task Crafting

  • Employee deviates from work tasks as formally outlined and makes changes to the scope, number, or type of the task they are required to carry out.
Relational crafting illustration: two people talking and shaking hands

Relational Crafting

  • Employee makes changes to the way they interact with others.
Cognitive crafting illustration: faceless person with two "masks" beside them, one happy and one sad. Abstract arrows above them, and abstract image of hands pointing in different directions.

Cognitive Crafting

  • Employee reframes the purpose, value, and meaning of a task, role, or job (i.e. changes their perception of the job they carry out).
Skill crafting illustration: person surrounded by icons: graduation cap, presentation board, gears with a checklist.

Skill Crafting

  • Employee tries to broaden or improve their skill set so as to better their performance and prepare themselves for broader job responsibilities.

Employee-Led Job Crafting - Case Studies

So what does job crafting look like in practice? How can employees lead this process?

Let's explore a few case studies. But first, read this article in the Harvard Business Review, What Job Crafting Looks Like Links to an external site. by Dutton and Wrzesniewski (2020), who first documented job crafting some 20 years ago, to learn about job crafting efforts by Rachel, Jake, and Candice.

Case Study Insights:

Candice: For Candice what started as cognitive crafting in which she attached more meaning to her role beyond cleaning soon resulted in task and relational crafting. Task crafting meant spending extra time doing certain tasks and forming relationships with patients and their families meant she engaged in relational crafting.

Rachel: In a similar manner Rachel has been involved in multiple types of job crafting, she has made changes to her assigned tasks by becoming the lead advocate for Positive Organizational Scholarship. In addition, she has engaged in relational crafting which had led to cognitive crafting where her view of her role goes beyond consulting but as well an energizer that can help her team in dealing with tough situations.

Jake: Jake on the other hand has taken on skill and task and relational crafting, this first started by forming relationships and gaining knowledge of equipment engineers which then resulted in changing their role to leading onboarding of new members. He also has joined Eco-Bees group in response to his social needs.

Activity: How Celia Crafted Her Term Role

As we learned in PD3, Celia took a role as a volunteer with the IMAGINE Clinic.

In her role, she had several professional development goals:

  • Learning more about pharmaceutical practice and equity
  • Strengthening her communication skills
  • Learning more about the process involved with pharmacological therapies
  • Implementing creativity in the workplace
  • Utilizing critical thinking within the pharmaceutical industry

Throughout her volunteer role, Celia had many opportunities to expand and change the scope of her role by leveraging job crafting.

Instructions:

There are 5 slides in the activity below, including 3 scenarios.

  1. Read each scenario and think about which type of job crafting it describes.
  2. Click the arrow at the bottom of the slide (beside the numbers) to continue to the next section.

Example of Job Crafting by a New Employee

Careers in accounting are commonly understood to be very systematic and rigid with rules, regulations, and reporting standards, which can be very daunting for industry professionals.

As a recent accounting graduate, Sarah, who had very little experience in the industry outside her degree, started in her new role as a public accountant. Here is a summary of how she transformed some aspects of her work:

  • Sarah is a person who enjoys connections with people and helps out in any way she can. Every time she felt negative about her new job, she started to re-examine the purpose of her work, how she can help businesses to correctly file taxes. She started to realize how her job can make an impact on others. She began to craft her job to frame it as an opportunity to rise to the occasion and use her files as a way to help her clients and fulfill her desire to help people in her everyday life. Further, through her interactions with clients, Sarah began to appreciate how her clients depended on her to finish their year-end and corporate taxes for their businesses.
  • Sarah also began to make more connections with her coworkers, which allowed her to learn from them to broaden her knowledge and experience through multiple projects. This made her realize how she could enjoy and appreciate the way she chooses to carry out her work, and this further impacted her productivity and engagement at work.
  • Finally, Sarah began to take it upon herself to help her firm in their hiring and recruiting process because she enjoys creating connections with others. She used these connections from her past to recruit new hires and gain attention from the local university during the process. This created a new path and another aspect of her job that made her feel fulfilled by helping her firm to connect with new opportunities.

Activity: New Employee Job Crafting

Think about Sarah's case study and answer the question below.

Instructions:

Select your answer(s) and click the blue "Check" button.

Example of Job Crafting in a Highly-Regulated Profession

Ariana is a Chartered Professional Accountant currently thriving in the public sector of accounting at a local firm in North Bay. Over the last 5 years, Ariana has crafted her role considerably while finding herself improving the firm's workplace processes along the way. She is well-respected and valued at her firm by clients, coworkers, and the partners themselves.

Ariana has heard others in the accounting profession state that accounting is too rigid and systematic to allow space for workplace innovation, including job crafting. For example, there is a general impression that work on organizational financial audits has little variation from year to year.

However, in Ariana's view, "you do what you need to do to get the job done while confirming that the financials are reasonable and fairly stated and abide by the regulations". For her, this means that there can be some room for different processes, templates, and methods but with a similar purpose and end result. Read through Ariana's crafting efforts (listed below) and identify what type of job crafting she has instigated.

  • Ariana has taken her strengths and applied them to this concept. She has crafted tasks and opportunities outside the requirements of her job to satisfy her needs and play to her strengths. For example, she found that by adjusting firm-standard spreadsheets to include more detail, the status of the work items on her projected job schedule can be better monitored within each project. This also helps to better allocate resources within each project for future years, which is not a requirement of her job but is something she has crafted to incorporate her own strengths.
  • Ariana also created a template for electronic notes that help her coordinate through the client files she is working on. She colour-coordinates the notes by section, importance, communication, and completion. This reminds her, or the next person who works on that client file, of tasks or issues that can be avoided or need to be dealt with in the future, with solutions and time allocations. This streamlined work process has improved productivity within the workplace.
  • One of Ariana's other strengths is her relationships and connections with others. Ariana took it upon herself to manage the productivity of client files and provide updated templates, notes, spreadsheets, and material to help her coworkers and to support the training of new staff. This gave her the satisfaction that she was making a difference by helping others around her with what she found to be a better practice of work. With time, people looked to her for advice and followed in her footsteps of crafting their positions to fill their needs while still completing the requirements of their jobs as well.

By integrating aspects of the strengths she appreciates, Ariana had made her job more enjoyable. What she has implemented has been a model for others to follow and she continues to be greatly respected in her office. With increasing productivity and more precise projections for the allocation of resources and files, the firm can better understand and achieve goals and increase profits for the future.

Activity: Job Crafting in a Highly-Regulated Profession

Think about Ariana's case study and answer the question below.

Instructions:

Select your answer(s) and click the blue "Check" button.

Icon: break time - a clock and a coffee cup Take a Break

This is a good place for a break. Stretch, grab a coffee, or simply leave this module for a while and come back to it later.

References

Bindl, U. K., Unsworth, K. L., Gibson, C. B., & Stride, C. B. (2019). Job crafting revisited: Implications of an extended framework for active changes at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(5), 605-628. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-56493-001.pdf Links to an external site. 

Dutton, J. E., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2020, March 12). What job crafting looks like. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/03/what-job-crafting-looks-like Links to an external site.