Titolo della tesi: Supervisors’ Job Crafting and Feedback Increase Performance by Promoting Employees’ Job Crafting and Work Engagement
This thesis aims to deepen our understanding of the relationship between supervisors' job
crafting behaviors and employees' job crafting behaviors and performance. Job crafting, initially
defined by Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) as "the physical and cognitive changes individuals
make in the task or relational boundaries of their work," has since been integrated into Job
Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory. This model emphasizes how employees can self-initiate
adjustments to job demands and resources (Tims & Bakker, 2010; Bakker & Demerouti, 2017) to
optimize job design, thereby enhancing engagement and performance (Demerouti & Bakker, 2024;
Opera et al., 2019; Holman et al., 2024). The main objective is to increase individual-organization
fit and make work comfortable for everyone.
Through the lens of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1997; Miraglia et al., 2017), job
crafting is viewed as an agentic process that enables individuals to adapt to and shape their work
environments. It is a proactive, person-environment (P-E) fit behavior that allows individuals to
align their tasks, relationships, and perceptions with their work environment for a better fit (Grant &
Parker, 2009; Parker & Collins, 2010; Tims, Bakker & Derks, 2013). Initially conceptualized as a
bottom-up interaction with the organization to enhance job fit, job crafting has been shown to
benefit employees directly and indirectly through multiple pathways. Directly, studies consistently
show that job crafting fosters positive workplace outcomes such as increased well-being, higher
engagement, and improved performance (Sakuraya et al., 2023; Slowiak & DeLongchamp, 2022).
Indirectly, research indicates that job crafting can initiate a virtuous cycle, with employees' crafting
behaviors positively impacting the broader organizational environment and colleagues, leading to
collective benefits (Yongrui & Xinyi, 2022; Wang et al., 2024; Zhao et al., 2023; Garg et al., 2021).
Given the productivity and well-being benefits of job crafting, the question arises as to how
organizations can promote it. While research has examined bottom-up job crafting, the top-down
role of supervisors in facilitating employee adaptation is less understood. Although organizational4
support is crucial for employee engagement and positive outcomes, the specific role of supervisors
in this process remains underexplored (Bakker, 2015; Shin et al., 2020). Supervisors, as role
models, can significantly influence employees' behaviors and values (Wang et al., 2024).
This thesis focuses on the role of supervisors, as they are active role models with significant
influence over employees' behaviors. Supervisors, through their authority and influence, serve as
key sources of information on organizationally endorsed behaviors, modeling these for their
subordinates (Greenbaum et al., 2012). Supervisors can promote or discourage job crafting not only
by example but also through their feedback and performance evaluations. Globally, this research
presents evidence of a "trickle-down effect" whereby supervisors' job crafting behaviors or their
episodic feedback positively influence employees' job crafting and work engagement and, always,
their performance.
Linking Supervisors’ Proactive Behavior to Employees’ crafting and engagement to improve
Performance
The main hypothesis underlying the three studies presented in this work is that supervisors’
crafting and feedback have positive effects on the well-being of employees -understood in terms of
crafting and engagement-, and finally on the performance of these latter. By testing this hypothesis,
we respond to the needs and demands of the organizations (increasing performance) and of the
workers (encouraging crafting and engagement), without neglecting the role of the supervisors who
must vertically mediate between the demands of their higher order managers and those of the group
of collaborators. These processes are nurtured by constant and contingent relationships between
supervisors and their collaborators, which produce well-being and content, especially through the
supervisor's relational crafting and contingent feedback habit. We take inspiration from crossover
theories (Bakker et al., 2009) and role theory to explain the importance of transactions between
supervisors and employees, reading the organizational processes in the light of both the abovementioned JD-R and the Conservation of Resources (COR) theories (Hobfoll, 1989). As stated above, we will use the JD-R theory and the COR theory to articulate a set of
hypotheses linking supervisors’ job crafting and feedback habit to employees well-being, in terms
of job crafting and engagement, and performance. In doing so, we will also benefit from a further
set of theories focused on crossover processes, and on social exchanges between organizational
roles.
Briefly reviewing the three studies, the first study, titled “Dynamic Model of the Supervisors’ Job Crafting on Collaborators’ Engagement and Performance: A Longitudinal Multimethod Study”, analyzed data from a major telecommunications organization in Europe, gathered during an internal review led by management. This study involved 2,748 junior managers and supervisors, along with 35,219 employees, representing a diverse range of roles, genders, and tenures. In addition to assessing job crafting behaviors, we had access to standardized, objective job performance evaluations for each participant, used by the organization for annual reviews, promotions, and incentives. We hypothesized that supervisors’ task and relational crafting would indirectly influence employees' job performance through (a) supervisors' own performance and (b) employees' task and relational crafting.
The second Study, titled “Supervisors’ Job Crafting and Employees’ Engagement and Performance: A Longitudinal Multimethod Study”, explored employees’ work engagement as the mediating mechanism linking supervisors’ job crafting with employees' job performance. Unlike the first study, this one used a two-wave longitudinal design with a sample of supervisors and employees from the same telecommunications company (N = 2,478 and N = 27,024, respectively). We tested a mediation model to examine how the crossover effect of supervisors' job crafting -self and other-evaluation- contributed to employees' performance improvement over time, mediated by increased work engagement.
The third study, titled “Different Feedback, Distinct Pathways: How Supervisor’ Episodic Feedback Shape Employee’s Job Crafting and Performance”, employed an intensive longitudinal design, tracking a cohort of 212 employees (57.6% female, average age 46.09 years) over a month. Each evening, participants reported on any positive or negative feedback received from their supervisors that day, as well as their own job crafting behaviors and performance. This study explored how episodic feedback -positive or negative- from supervisors fosters job crafting behaviors and enhances job performance, as well as the moderating effect of supervisors’ feedback habit on the relationship between episodic feedback and employee’s job crafting.
Together, these studies provide a comprehensive examination of how supervisor behaviors shape employees' job crafting and work engagement, and finally performance outcomes.