Prompting for Perks: Enhancing Generative-AI Enabled Job Crafting in Knowledge Work

The increasing use of Generative AI (GAI) has captivated industries seeking to enhance productivity, particularly among white-collar workers. While the impact of GAI on workforce efficiency is widely recognised, its benefits for employees remain underexplored. This study draws upon job crafting theory from occupational psychology, which argues that employees modify their work environment based on existing job demands and resources to achieve personal benefits. Using a between-subjects design, we investigate how GAI influences job crafting behaviour, where participants engaged in a problem-solving task. We manipulated a prompt support intervention in form of worked examples upfront to analyse whether it reinforces job crafting behaviour. A pre-test with 42 participants indicated that prompt support can increase GAI-enabled job crafting, but only for those with high AI literacy. The findings underscore the importance of AI literacy and prompt engineering in optimising job crafting behaviour, advocating for organisational training programs to support these skills.