“Is it up to you to bring a new perspective to your job?” Increasing engagement through flow experience and happiness

BackgroundAnchored in the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study clarifies how JC relates to WE through experiential-affective states.ObjectiveThis study investigates whether flow experience (FE) and workplace happiness (WH) sequentially mediate the relationship between job crafting (JC) and work engagement (WE), offering a clearer account of how JC translates into engagement.MethodsUsing survey data from 324 private-sector employees in Türkiye, we applied PLS-SEM and a serial mediation procedure to test indirect effects of JC on WE via FE and WH.ResultsPath results suggest that JC does not exert a significant direct influence on WE; rather, its influence is transmitted indirectly through FE and WH. Evidence also supports a sequential mediation in which job crafting first enhances flow experience, which subsequently elevates workplace happiness, ultimately increasing work engagement, with FE exerting a stronger mediating role than WH.ConclusionsThis study addresses the ongoing ambiguity about which positive organizational behavior constructs these frameworks most strongly implicate across social and individual contexts. By specifying a sequential mechanism, JC first enhances FE; heightened FE then increases WH; increased WH ultimately culminates in higher WE, the study sharpens theoretical accounts of motivational pathways emphasized by JD-R and SDT. To strengthen external validity, future work should employ larger samples, conduct comparative analyses across private and public sectors, and pursue cross-cultural designs to probe boundary conditions and generalizability.