Leadership, job crafting, and employee health and performance

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to integrate the effects of top-down leadership and employees’ bottom-up job crafting behaviors on employee health and performance. The authors expected that employees’ promotion- and prevention-focused job crafting act as intervening mechanisms linking top-down employee-oriented leadership with employee health and performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Multi-source data were collected among n=117 independent employee-leader dyads.

Findings

Promotion-focused job crafting was positively and prevention-focused job crafting was negatively related to employees’ health and performance. Employee-oriented leadership was positively related to promotion-focused job crafting but unrelated to prevention-focused job crafting. Employee-oriented leadership was indirectly related to health and performance through promotion-focused job crafting. Moreover, promotion-focused job crafting had the strongest positive impact on adaptive performance, followed by proactive and then task performance, while prevention-focused job crafting had the strongest negative impact on task performance followed by proactive and then adaptive performance.

Research limitations/implications

Despite the cross-sectional study design, results reveal how employee-oriented leadership is related to employee health and performance through promotion-focused job crafting.

Practical implications

Organizations need employee-oriented leaders, who facilitate promotion-focused job crafting, which helps employees to perform well while staying well.

Originality/value

This study adds to the literatures on job crafting, leadership, and employee health and performance by explicating intervening processes in these relationships. It adds to research on the extended job demands-resources job crafting model by showing, that promotion- and prevention-focused job crafting has different relationships with antecedents (i.e. leadership) and outcomes (i.e. health and performance).

Citation

Lichtenthaler, P.W. and Fischbach, A. (2018), "Leadership, job crafting, and employee health and performance", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 39 No. 5, pp. 620-632. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-07-2017-0191