Increasing Collaborative Crafting: Leadership Training and Workspace Design

Job crafting is a tool used by employees in order to respond to and cope with implemented organizational change. This quasi-experimental study investigated the capacity of a leadership-level intervention to increase collaborative (team) job crafting within an organization that was attempting to mobilize employees and persuade them to embrace changes to their work design. Leaders attended a workshop that was designed to enhance their understanding of collaborative crafting and to facilitate discussion regarding their reactions and approaches to such behaviours. Over two measurement occasions, intervention teams split between teams whose members were collocated (n = 34) and teams whose members were dispersed (n=29) were compared to collocated control teams (n = 23). Multi-level analysis revealed a significant increase in the intervention teams’ collaborative crafting in comparison to the control teams. However, these effects were dependent on whether the team members were collocated. The findings advance job crafting literature by highlighting how leadership understanding of job crafting can directly influence the amount of collaborative crafting their teams exhibit. Secondly, the findings highlight how configurations of the physical workspace influence collaborative behaviours. Given the widespread adoption of new ways of working e.g. remote and hybrid models these findings provide timely insight.