Shaping Care From Within: Job Crafting in Long-Term Care Home

This study examines how long-term care home workers craft their jobs within relational, emotional, and structurally constrained care settings. Based on semi-structured interviews with 15 workers and hybrid thematic analysis, findings show that workers engaged in all four dimensions of job crafting. However, their adjustments were strongly shaped by organizational conditions. Flexible policies and effective communication enabled role adaptation, whereas perceived inequity, negative coworker relationships, and hierarchical disconnection constrained or redirected crafting toward protective strategies. Job crafting emerged as a collective and relational process through which workers sustained care quality and emotional balance while navigating structural pressures and moral commitments.