A novel tool to assess employee' proactive efforts to fulfill their psychological needs at work

What is it about?

We introduce the Needs-Based Job Crafting Scale (NJCS), a new tool designed to assess how people shape their jobs to meet their psychological needs for detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation. We conducted three studies to develop and validate the NJCS. In the first study, we developed the NJCS and tested its factorial structure using data from 578 Finnish employees. In the second study, we confirmed the structure and checked if the scale remains consistent over time using data from 578 Finnish employees and 228 Japanese employees. In the third study, we collected data from 1,101 German and Swiss employees to examine the validity of the scale looking at the associations between the NJCS and other established scales. Our findings show that the NJCS consists of six factors measuring job crafting for detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation. The NJCS showed strong convergent validity when compared to other job crafting scales and personality measures. It effectively predicted work engagement, job satisfaction, burnout, and psychological needs satisfaction, highlighting its utility in understanding work life. Furthermore, it offered unique insights beyond the existing job crafting scale, demonstrating its added value for theory and research. Overall, the NJCS, alongside the existing Needs-Based Off-Job Crafting Scale (NOCS), offers a comprehensive way to study how people shape their work and non-work lives to meet their psychological needs.

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Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The NJCS offers a fresh perspective on how employees shape their jobs to meet their psychological needs. Unlike previous approaches, the NJCS directly integrates psychological needs as fundamental motivations for job crafting, shedding light on how satisfaction of these needs influences outcomes. Furthermore, the NJCS emphasizes employees' intrinsic motivation for job crafting, allowing for a deeper understanding of why certain crafting efforts lead to various outcomes. Finally, by combining the NJCS with the NOCS, researchers can explore crafting processes within and across both work and non-work domains, offering insights into how these efforts influence well-being.