Work engagement is a scientifically consolidated variable, due to its fundamental role in business practice. To increase work engagement in companies, it is necessary to know which variables are antecedents and how they relate to each other. These variables include job autonomy, job crafting, and psychological capital. This research evaluates the relationships between job autonomy, job crafting, psychological capital, and work engagement. Specifically, based on the job demands and resources model and the conservation of resources theory, the study examines these relationships in a sample of 483 employees, through a serial mediation model. The results show that job crafting, and psychological capital mediates the relationship between job autonomy and work engagement. These results have practical implications for interventions to promote employee work engagement.

Responding to the call for more research on cognitive crafting, this study focuses on employees' reframing of their job characteristics to assign higher importance to job resources and downplay the relevance of costly job demands. Furthermore, it examines how these proactive cognitive strategies are embedded in an overall job crafting process, including both cognitive and behavioral aspects, and linked with work engagement. Preliminary results (n = 247) support the conceptualization of cognitive crafting encompassing approach and avoidance aspects targeting resources and demands, respectively. Moreover, three-wave data (n = 84) show that employees' cognitive efforts to highlight the centrality of job resources influence work engagement over time. Importantly, proactively organizing work leads to higher work engagement by prompting cognitive reframing of the relevance of job resources as central to one's work. Differently, cognitive efforts to downplay the relevance of hindering job demands are unrelated to following proactive behaviors and work engagement.

The purpose of this research is to examine configurations of proactive personality and ICT-enabled technostress creators as drivers of job crafting for Gen Z, Gen Y, and Gen X+ workers. Adhering to configurational theorizing, the study was conducted using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Survey responses collected from 335 full-time workers revealed that the presence of a proactive personality was a necessary condition for job crafting to occur within the context of ICT demands for these generations. Four configurations for Gen Z, five configurations for Gen Y, and four configurations for Gen X+ workers revealed sufficient conditions for job crafting. The present research contemporizes Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory by incorporating ICT as a modern-day job demand. In using fsQCA as a novel qualitative methodological tool, this research offers new meaning to the prior regression-based findings regarding proactive personality trait's relationship with job crafting.

Ever more people are in paid work following the age of state pension availability, and yet the experience of working in this phase of the late career has been little studied. We interviewed a purposive sample of 25 Swedish people in their mid- to late sixties and early seventies, many of whom were or had recently been working while claiming an old-age pension. The data were analysed with constant comparative analysis in which we described and refined categories through the writing of analytic memos and diagramming. We observed that paid work took place within a particular material, normative and emotional landscape: a stable and secure pension income decommodifying these workers from the labour market, a social norm of a retired lifestyle and a looming sense of contraction of the future. This landscape made paid work in these years distinctive: characterised by immediate intrinsic rewards and processes of containing and reaffirming commitments to jobs. The oldest workers were able to craft assertively the temporal flexibility of their jobs in order to protect the autonomy and freedom that retirement represented and retain favoured job characteristics. Employed on short-term (hourly) contracts or self-employed, participants continually reassessed their decision to work. Participation in paid work in the retirement years is a distinctive second stage in the late career which blends the second and third ages.

As a new management reform adapting the development of the times, electronic human resource management (E-HRM) covers all possible integration mechanisms and contents between HRM and Information Technologies. E-HRM promotes employees' subject status with the network characteristics of openness and cooperation. Taking the theory of work adjustment as the instruction, this research studies the adaptive process induced by reconstructing the sense of matching when employees experience the reform, along with the influence of E-HRM on employee's initiative behavior from the perspective of job crafting. In total, 706 employees and their supervisors were investigated with matched questionnaire survey. The results show that: (1) E-HRM can stimulate employees' personal initiative behavior; (2) task crating, relational crafting and cognitive crafting as three dimensions of employees' job crafting, mediate the effect of E-HRM on personal initiative behavior and (3) the self-development motivation of employees' internet use plays a positive moderating role, steering self-oriented job crafting in the positive direction which conforms to the organizations' expectation.

The current research examines the combined role of proactive personality and political skill in job crafting and work engagement by integrating the job demands-resources (JD-R) model and trait activation theory. Self-reported survey responses collected from three samples – university students (study 1, N = 363) and panel data (study 2, N = 300 and study 3, N = 206) – were analyzed using the PROCESS macro. Results revealed that political skill strengthened the relationship between proactive personality and work engagement and between proactive personality and job crafting when trait activated. Furthermore, perceived supervisor support did not interact with the job crafting–work engagement relationship with trait activation, suggesting that proactive individuals rely on self-resources to improve engagement when presented with trait-relevant situational cues. The findings extend JD-R theory to offer the interplay of proactive trait and political skill in facilitating overall job crating. JD-R is identified as a contextual condition for trait activation.

In this work, two objectives were addressed. First, the visual aesthetics assessment of the workplace was explored for the first time as a potential antecedent of the proactive behaviors of job crafting. Second, the potential mediating role of the affective organizational commitment in this relationship was analyzed. To address these purposes, a field study was conducted with a sample of 428 workers. Following a set of hypotheses, the results of the measurement model, χ2 (df) = 494.288 (215); CFI = .920; TLI = .906; RMSEA = .066, showed that the visual aesthetics assessment of the workplace was significantly correlated with three of the four dimensions of job crafting (r = .19 with ISO-JR, r = .15 with IC-JD and; r = .17 with IST-JR; p < .001) and with affective organizational commitment (r = .27, p < .001). In addition, through a structural equation model, χ2(df) = 494.895 (219); CFI = .921; TLI = .909; RMSEA = .065, positive and significant indirect effects were found from the visual aesthetic assessment of the workplace to the same three dimensions of job crafting, all through the affective organizational commitment: .17 with ISO-JR, .25 with IC-JD and, .23 with IST-JR; 95% CI [.097, .276], [.161, .361] and [.161, .361], respectively. The results obtained provide useful evidence for researchers and managers about the value of providing an aesthetically satisfactory workplace, which would enhance the affective commitment of employees and, consequently, positively affect the proactive behaviors of job crafting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether different supervisory styles are relevant in facilitating or inhibiting job crafting, and whether job crafting plays a significant role in promoting self-competence and work performance. Data were gathered from 162 employees in a large manufacturing company. We found a positive relationship between promotive control and job crafting, and a negative relationship between restrictive control and job crafting. Some job crafting behaviors positively affect both self-competence and performance, while others have a negative effect. Our results suggest that organizations interested in promoting job crafting should encourage a promotive style of leadership.