Examining the interplay between job crafting and job satisfaction: A cross-cultural investigation

The positive relationship between job crafting and positive work outcomes, often mediated by individual basic needs, is well-supported; however, little is known about whether these relationships, specifically the mediation, hold across cultures. We investigated the relationship between job crafting and job satisfaction among nurses from diverse cultural contexts, as well as the potential mediating role of basic need satisfaction. We conducted a cross-cultural comparative study among nurses in hospital settings across three distinct cultural contexts: Lebanon, India, and the USA. We tested (a) whether the scales employed were psychometrically invariant via MGCFA and (b) conducted multi-group SEM to test the relationship between job crafting, need satisfaction, and job satisfaction across the three cultural samples. Only two of the four job crafting dimensions (increasing social job resources and increasing challenging job demands) and one of the three basic need satisfaction dimensions (need for autonomy) reached metric invariance. Hypotheses were tested for the metrically invariant scales: While job crafting was related to job satisfaction in the Lebanese and USA samples, no such relationship was found in the Indian sample. Only in the Lebanese and USA samples, increasing challenging job demands was related to job satisfaction, through the satisfaction of the need for autonomy. Increasing social job resources was related to job satisfaction only in the Lebanese sample. We recommend testing the psychometric appropriateness of measures before employing them and discuss what this means for job crafting research directions and practical implications.