Abstract
Employees frequently engage in job crafting to better match their jobs with their personal abilities and skills. Compared with its benefits, the potential detrimental consequences of job crafting have received less attention from researchers. Drawing on relative deprivation theory, we examined employees’ potential negative reactions to coworkers’ job crafting. We proposed that coworkers’ job crafting is positively related to employees’ feelings of relative deprivation, thus reducing prosocial behaviors and giving rise to social undermining. We further argued that employees’ zero-sum mindset moderates the relationship between coworkers’ job crafting and employees’ feelings of relative deprivation, such that the relationship is more positive when the zero-sum mindset is high rather than low. Our hypotheses were generally supported by time-lagged data collected from a sample of 313 employees and their leaders from 85 teams. Our findings advance the understanding of the unintended consequences of job crafting in organizations.
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08 July 2022
The original version of this article was revised: In the Acknowledgment of this article two grant number were incorrectly given. The original article has been corrected.
12 July 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05204-z
Notes
There is no proper theoretical understanding of how job crafting exerts its effects over time. Research has found job crafting to be impactful using a daily diary design (Petrou et al., 2012), weekly design (Petrou et al., 2017; Tims et al., 2016), monthly design (Tims et al., 2013a), as well as designs with longer time frames (Lu et al., 2014). The design of data collection is also a practical issue (Aguinis et al., 2019). Prior to data collection, we talked to the team managers to ensure that they all found the 1-month interval to be feasible considering their work schedules. Researchers have also suggested a one-month interval to be appropriate, as it is not too long for the priming effects to begin to decrease and not too short for the antecedents not to exert their influence on later outcomes (Grant, 2008; Matthews et al., 2014; Sun et al., 2020).
The first-order model with four factors (χ2 = 119.61, df = 48, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.95, TLI = 0.93, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR-within = 0.07, SRMR-between = 0.00, AIC = 8434.67, BIC = 8592.01; Adjusted BIC = 8458.80) also had a good fit with the data. The fit indices of the second-order model and the first-order model were quite similar. However, it is suggested that “fit indices are very beneficial, but they are no replacement for sound judgment and substantive expertise” (Bollen & Long, 1993, p. 8). It is important to integrate theory with research aims to distinguish between models that produce similar fit index values (Schmitt, 2011; West et al., 2012). As our goal was to examine the potential negative effects of job crafting in general, rather than the differential effects of specific forms of job crafting, we chose the second-order factor model in which job crafting was treated as a general construct (see also Dierdorff & Jensen, 2018).
All of the factor loadings reached the threshold value of 0.40 (Hair et al., 2010). For detailed information, please contact the corresponding author.
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This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 72102009, 71701074, 72132001 and 71802008), and Post-doctoral Foundation of China (Grant No. 2020M680305).
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The original version of this article was revised: In the Acknowledgment of this article two grant number were incorrectly given. The original article has been corrected.
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Dong, Y., Zhang, L., Wang, HJ. et al. Why is Crafting the Job Associated with Less Prosocial Reactions and More Social Undermining? The Role of Feelings of Relative Deprivation and Zero-Sum Mindset. J Bus Ethics 184, 175–190 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05093-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05093-2