ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the job crafting and coping literatures and portrays job characteristics as dynamic phenomena which are enacted by people for specific purposes. It shows that how this approach to job design can be used to help understand how some job characteristics can protect and enhance daily levels of well-being, learning, creativity, innovation, and cognitive performance through facilitating the generation and implementation of solutions to workplace problem-solving demands. The chapter reviews how traditional approaches to job design have furthered our understanding of what makes for good and productive work. It reviews some of the unstated assumptions of this approach that are inherent to the methodologies used in stream of literature. The chapter also examines some of the major principles from the emerging literature on job crafting. It shows that how the literature on job design can be extended to examine how workers shape their work over the short-term for specific purposes.