Challenge Accepted: The Role of Job Crafting in Transforming Work Environment Incongruence into Innovative Behavior

ABSTRACT Our study explores the impact of the incongruence between employees' perceived and ideal work environments on their innovative behavior through different job crafting dimensions. Our research shows that increasing challenging job demands promotes innovative behavior, while increasing resources and decreasing demands negatively affect it. Our study, with data from over 10,000 employees, underscores the importance of differentiating between job crafting dimensions, revealing that the proactive pursuit of challenging demands fosters innovation. This suggests employees actively reshape their roles to seek challenges that lead to innovation. Theoretically, it enriches job crafting literature, and practically, it highlights the significance for organizations to consider individual crafting behaviors to unlock innovative potential.