Working Proactively in a Social Status-Diverse Workgroup: The Important Roles of Job Crafting Strategies and Emotional Intelligence

Abstract Working in social status-diverse work environments can be demanding for employees. While social status diversity is on the rise in the workplace, as people are somehow motivated to pursue higher social standing, working in such environments often leads to feelings of exhaustion, jealousy, conflicts, and unfairness among employees. Given these challenges, it is important to understand how individual employees can successfully function in such a work environment. Based on individual proactivity and job demands-resources literatures, we propose job crafting and emotional intelligence can help employees to perform their tasks well and to stay engaged while working in a social status-diverse workgroup. We conducted a weekly diary study during four consecutive workweeks among 368 medical employees nested within 42 multidisciplinary workgroups. The multilevel regression results showed that workgroup social status diversity was positively related to employees’ weekly task performance and work engagement only if employees engaged highly in weekly seeking resources behavior (one dimension of job crafting), and that this relationship was even more positive for those employees who scored high on emotional intelligence. Additional multigroup analyses revealed that seeking resources behavior was a helpful strategy particularly for low-rank employees. Together, these findings suggest that seeking resources is an effective behavioral strategy especially for low-rank employees, and emotional intelligence is a valuable personal resource that assists individuals to work effectively in social status-diverse workgroups.