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The aim of this paper is to conceptualize employees' sustainable work abilities, or their long‐term adaptive and proactive abilities to work, farewell at work, and contribute through working. Sustainable work is defined as to promote the development in personal resources leading to sustainable work ability.

The conceptual paper distinguishes vital personal resources underlying an employee's sustainable work ability and categorizes these resources with the help of integral theory. Collaborative work crafting was outlined as a tool to promote the development of personal resources and sustainable work ability.

Sustainable work ability depends on personal resources relating to our human nature as both individual and communal beings with both interior and exterior worlds. Work crafting may create sustainable work in which existing personal resources are benefited from, developed further through learning, or translated into novel resources.

When formal job descriptions and preplanned job design do not work in post‐industrial work, traditional job design can be replaced by collaborative work crafting, which allows development in both work and employees.

The paper synthesizes different types of personal resources needed for sustainable working and outlines their development processes, rather than adds one more theory to explain some specific aspect of well‐being, development, and functioning. The paper offers one of the first definitions of sustainable work.

Social entrepreneurship, leveraging economic activities to achieve social benefits, offers women the opportunity to freely and actively shape the contours of their work in meaningful ways. This study aims to examine how Chinese women use job crafting in social entrepreneurship to align their gender identity, forge meaningful work and new relationships and navigate mixed gender expectations.

The study is based on 19 in-depth interviews with young women engaging in social entrepreneurship in China. Using a grounded theory approach, the study explores how women craft their gender identity into the unconventional career path of creating their social venture, focusing on the creative combination of task, relational and cognitive crafting in shaping social entrepreneurship.

The findings suggest that women make social entrepreneurship meaningful by actively aligning their gender experiences to delineate a relational and cognitive causal path between their social enterprise, their identity as women and their moral values. By working for a larger social cause, women may cognitively reframe their gender identity to compromise financial performance for social impact.

Current studies on social entrepreneurship in China have yet to examine its development through a gender lens. This study uses job crafting to highlight the distinctive gender meaning-making process for Chinese women to enhance their work identity and to challenge normative gender expectations. The study shows that job crafting enables women to view their social ventures as a means of gender empowerment, helping them to reconcile the paradoxical pressures of normative gender expectations and scaling up their businesses.

The design of a job is deeply consequential for employees’ psychological experiences at work. Jobs are collections of tasks and relationships that are grouped together and assigned to an individual (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1992), and scholars have long been interested in the way these elements come together to constitute the experience of a job (Griffin, 1987; Hackman & Oldham, 1980). Research in this area has traditionally built on a core assumption that managers design jobs in a top-down fashion for employees, which places employees in the relatively passive role of being the recipients of the jobs they hold.

This study investigated the relationship of strengths-based leadership with nurses’ turnover intention and the mediating roles of job crafting and work fatigue in the relationship.

Data comprising 318 valid participants from three hospitals in Beijing were gathered at two points in time, spaced by a two-month interval. Structural equation modeling with a bootstrapping analysis was applied to test hypotheses.

This study found that strengths-based leadership negatively relates to nurses’ turnover intention, and job crafting and work fatigue mediate the relationship of strengths-based leadership with turnover intention, respectively.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of strengths-based leadership in decreasing nurses’ turnover intention and reveal two potential mechanisms through which strengths-based leadership is related to nurses’ turnover intention. In order to retain nursing staff better, nurse leaders should execute more strengths-based leadership behaviors and make more efforts to promote nurses’ job crafting and to reduce nurses’ experience of work fatigue.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether job crafting and work enjoyment could explain the well-established relationship between self-efficacy and job performance. The authors hypothesized that employees would be most likely to engage in proactive job crafting behaviors on the days when they feel most self-efficacious. Daily job crafting, in turn, was expected to relate to daily performance through daily work enjoyment.

A daily diary study was conducted among a heterogeneous sample of employees (N=47, days=215). Participants completed the survey on five consecutive days.

The results of multilevel structural equation modeling analyses were generally in line with the hypotheses. Specifically, results indicated that employees who felt more self-efficacious on a given day were more likely to mobilize their job resources on that day. Daily job crafting, in turn, was positively correlated to work enjoyment and indirectly associated with performance. Participants reported elevated levels of performance on the days on which they enjoyed their work most.

Self-reports were used to assess all constructs, which may result in common method bias. However, within-person correlations were moderate, and a two-level CFA indicated that a one-factor model could not account for all the variance in the data.

The findings of this study underscore the importance of daily proactive behavior for employee and organizational outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to offer a model explicating telework as a dynamic process, theorizing that teleworkers continuously adjust – their identities, boundaries and relationships – to meet their own needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness in their work and nonwork roles.

This study uses the lens of job crafting to posit changes teleworkers make to enhance work-nonwork balance and job performance, including time-related individual differences to account for contingencies in dynamic adjustments. Finally, this study discusses how feedback from work and nonwork role partners and one’s self-evaluation results in an iterative process of learning to telework over time.

This model describes how teleworkers craft work and nonwork roles to satisfy needs, enhancing key outcomes and eliciting role partner feedback to further recraft telework.

The propositions can be translated to hypotheses. As such the dynamic model for crafting telework can be used as a basis for empirical studies aimed at understanding how telework adjustment process unfolds.

Intervention studies could focus on teleworkers’ job crafting behavior. Organizations may also offer training to prepare employees to telework and to create conditions under which teleworkers’ job crafting behavior more easily translates into need satisfaction and positive outcomes.

Many employees would prefer to work from home, at least partly, when the COVID-19 crisis is over. This model offers a way to facilitate a smooth transition into this work mode while ensuring work nonwork balance and performance.

Most telework research takes a static approach to focus on the work–family interface. This study proffers a dynamic approach suggesting need satisfaction as the mechanism enabling one to combine work and domestic roles and delineating how feedback enables continuous adjustment in professional and personal roles.

This study aims to explore how and when managers' job crafting contributes to their service performance. The first objective of the research was to assess the mediating relationship between franchised restaurant managers' job crafting, work engagement and service performance. Its second objective was to examine the moderating effect of organizational control systems on the job crafting–work engagement relationship.

The authors administered paper-and-pencil surveys to 235 franchised restaurant managers in South Korea. The authors tested their hypotheses via Process 3.5 macro and bootstrapping.

The results confirmed the mediating effect of work engagement on the relationship between job crafting and work engagement. Furthermore, this relationship was more pronounced when the headquarters used a high level of outcome-based control systems and a low level of behavior-based control systems.

Distinct from studies that have examined service employees' job crafting, this study uncovers the role of managerial job crafting in service performance. The findings contribute to service theory and practice by providing novel insights into the interplay between managerial job crafting and organizational control systems.

The argument that work engagement enhances job performance has gained wide acceptance among practitioners and human resources management literature. There is consensus in management literature that job crafting can affect work engagement. The concept of callings from theology has been resurrected in job behavior and continues to garner growing attention from practitioners in recent years. However, few studies examine how and why living a calling influence job crafting and work engagement. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between living a calling, job crafting and work engagement for knowledgeable employees through questionnaires.

The part-time MBA students were asked to reflect on present jobs. In total, 390 effective questionnaires were collected from part-time MBA students of four universities in Chongqing, China for finance, administration, manufacturing, service, technology, medication, education and others. Results were analyzed using SPSS and Amos. The measurement scale is given in Appendix.

First, the author explicitly proposes and validates the direct relationship between living a calling and job crafting. Second, this study confirms that crafting challenging job demands are significant to vigor subdimension and dedication subdimension of work engagement, whereas crafting challenging job demands not significant to absorption subdimension of work engagement. Third, this study indicates that crafting hindering job demands are nonsignificant to vigor, dedication and absorption about three subdimensions of work engagement. Fourth, this study showed living a calling can enhance work engagement for employees. Fifth, this study finds three groups (eight items) of mediation effect between living a calling, job crafting and work engagement.

These insights may help managers to focus on living a calling and encourage beneficial job crafting behaviors in China. The sample is original and has the potential to contribute to debate on work life balance and particularly the meaning of work/careers in China.

This study is an interesting revisit to the old workplace sociology and organizational psychology which has become somewhat neglected these days.

This study has provided insight in the relationships between living a calling, job crafting and work engagement.

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Career Development International, a state-of-the-art overview of recent trends in job-crafting research was conducted. Since job crafting was introduced twenty years ago as a type of proactive work behavior that employees engage in to adjust their jobs to their needs, skills, and preferences, research has evolved tremendously.

To take stock of recent developments and to unravel the latest trends in the field, this overview encompasses job-crafting research published in the years 2016–2021. The overview portrays that recent contributions have matured the theoretical and empirical advancement of job-crafting research from three perspectives (i.e. individual, team and social).

When looking at the job-crafting literature through these three perspectives, a total of six trends were uncovered that show that job-crafting research has moved to a more in-depth theory-testing approach; broadened its scope; examined team-level job crafting and social relationships; and focused on the impact of job crafting on others in the work environment and their evaluations and reactions to it.

The overview of recent trends within the job-crafting literature ends with a set of recommendations for how future research on job crafting could progress and create scientific impact for the coming years.

Due to volatile changes and crises in the business environment, frontline service employees (FSEs) are faced with increasing work stressors in the new service marketplace. Of these, customer incivility has been found to negatively affect their work outcomes. This study aims to examine the moderating effect of experiencing an imminent environmental crisis (i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic) on the relationship between customer incivility, work engagement and job crafting, using pre- and postpandemic samples.

The authors administered two-wave surveys to 276 FSEs (prepandemic sample) in July and October 2019 and to 301 FSEs (postpandemic sample) in March and April 2020.

Moderation analyses showed that the relationship between customer incivility, work engagement and job crafting varied between FSEs who experienced the pandemic and those who did not; the relationship was stronger for the postpandemic than the prepandemic sample. There was a positive relationship between work engagement and job crafting; it was weaker for the postpandemic sample.

The deleterious effect of customer incivility exacerbated after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, the authors did not explore why the pandemic aggravated the negative effect. The mechanism underlying the moderating effect of the pandemic and the effect of more diverse types of incivility should be explored in future research.

It is critical to provide FSEs with instrumental and emotional support to cope with the crisis brought on by the pandemic. Service organizations must monitor customers’ uncivil behaviors to identify their causes and develop interventions to improve service quality. Furthermore, service organizations are advised to enhance the coping capabilities of FSEs by using diverse interventions, such as emotion regulation training, debriefing sessions, short breaks and job crafting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to reveal the moderating effect of the pandemic on the relationships between customer incivility, work engagement and job crafting, using pre- and postpandemic samples. This study offers necessary insights to improve FSEs’ engagement at work and enhance their job crafting in the new service marketplace.