Linking Work Meaningfulness with Job Crafting: Moderating Role of Identity

Abstract

The study examines the moderating effect of social identification as an individual-level condition between individuals’ need for work meaningfulness and task, cognitive, and relational job crafting. I employ Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s job crafting theory, resource dependence theory, and multi-identity perspective as the overall theoretical frameworks and base my hypothesis on the work meaningfulness, job crafting, and social identity literature. Based on this, I posit that when an employee perceives a need for work meaningfulness this positively affects task, cognitive, and relational crafting. The relationship between work meaningfulness and task and cognitive will be amplified when that individual has a weaker sense of “we” (i.e., low social identification), performing activities that are performed relatively independent from others. On the other hand, I postulate that the association between work meaningfulness and relational crafting will be strengthened when an employee embarks a stronger sense of “we” (i.e. high social identification), which involves interpersonal interactions with team or immediate members. Analyzing data attained from 156 employees working in diverse organizations in Korea and by means of hierarchical regression analyses and interaction graph analyses, the majority of hypotheses were supported. This implies when need for work meaningfulness is fulfilled and leads to the respected job crafting dimensions, the level of social identification determines whether or not individuals further engage in different job crafting activities, suggesting a booster effect. Most importantly, a complementary mechanism between need for work meaningfulness and social identification was discovered, in that when individuals do not relatively identify with their groups (i.e., low social identification), the level of need for work meaningfulness was a crucial factor inducing job crafting.