PurposeIn celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Career Development International, a state-of-the-art overview of recent trends in job-crafting research was conducted. Since job crafting was introduced twenty years ago as a type of proactive work behavior that employees engage in to adjust their jobs to their needs, skills, and preferences, research has evolved tremendously.Design/methodology/approachTo take stock of recent developments and to unravel the latest trends in the field, this overview encompasses job-crafting research published in the years 2016–2021. The overview portrays that recent contributions have matured the theoretical and empirical advancement of job-crafting research from three perspectives (i.e. individual, team and social).FindingsWhen looking at the job-crafting literature through these three perspectives, a total of six trends were uncovered that show that job-crafting research has moved to a more in-depth theory-testing approach; broadened its scope; examined team-level job crafting and social relationships; and focused on the impact of job crafting on others in the work environment and their evaluations and reactions to it.Originality/valueThe overview of recent trends within the job-crafting literature ends with a set of recommendations for how future research on job crafting could progress and create scientific impact for the coming years.

Team member proactivity refers to self-starting, future-directed behavior to change a team’s situation or the way a team works. While previous studies have shown that individuals generally benefit from their proactivity, few studies have explored how others in a team experience it. This is important as the way peers perceive team member proactivity could be critical for the initiative to be effective. We conducted a 5-month in-depth study to uncover how peers from three self-managing agile teams react to instances of team member proactivity. Our findings suggest a process model of team member proactivity, in which we show that peers react at two distinct moments during proactive episodes. Depending on its perceived success and whether peers directed their reaction to the proactive employee or at their initiative, peer reactions unfolded in four different pathways: by (1) belittling the proactive team member, (2) criticizing the proactivity initiative, (3) supporting the proactive initiative, or (4) admiring the proactive team member. We explain how and why these reactions are formed by showcasing their cognitive, affective, and behavioral evaluations. Our findings contribute to the proactivity literature, provide a process perspective for understanding how peers perceive proactivity, and present implications for sustaining proactivity in teams.

Many organizations are reorganizing themselves around teams, often self-managing teams, as the benefits are indispensable. These self-managing teams are obliged to collectively take responsibility for activities, such as monitoring goal progress, coordinating tasks, and proactively improving the team’s performance as well as the quality of their work. Yet, organizational scholars have largely disregarded how self-managing teams, such as agile teams, deal with this increased responsibility. This dissertation takes a profound look within teams by examining how they effectively engage in and interact around behavioral processes that are presumed to keep up the team’s performance. Central is the notion that peers and the way they react play a unique role in shaping the team’s functioning. Building on observational research of agile teams and their work, this dissertation offers insights into the momentum and friction caused by peer reactions over time. Throughout the dissertation, peer reactions are scrutinized when team members discuss team processes, communicate their proactive initiatives, and control their behavior or performance during team interactions. In Chapter 2, I build on a five-month field study at an energy network company in the Netherlands. During this period, I explored how the members of three agile teams from the IT department responded to each other’s proactive initiatives intended to benefit the team. Shadowing their meetings and work in the office allowed me to show that peers formed cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions to the proactive initiatives of their team members based on their first judgements. Specifically, peers directed their response towards (1) belittling or (2) admiring the proactive team member, or (3) criticizing or (4) supporting the proactive initiative. In Chapter 3, I aimed to grasp which team processes are most important for teams to engage in during their daily coordination meetings. Based on the observation, recording, and coding of daily ‘stand-up’ meetings for 30 weeks, I captured the temporal dynamics of the processes discussed by two agile teams working at a large Dutch insurance company. These meetings appeared to be crucial moments for the team to interact about collectively working towards achieving their team goals. The findings revealed that transition processes were only positively associated with a higher meeting effectiveness during the early phases of performance episodes. However, in contrast to current theorizing, action processes appeared to negatively impact meeting effectiveness during late phases of performance episodes. Moreover, peers tend to agree with their fellow team member's remarks about coordination and monitoring but avoid disagreeing with them when they discuss planning and strategizing the team’s work. Chapter 4 continues to build on the 18-month field study at the Dutch insurance company, thereby focusing my attention on how peer control takes place during the interactions of the IT department’s five agile teams. Shadowing the teams and their (meeting) interactions allowed me to uncover three direct control tactics that members used to monitor each other’s performance and behaviors for the team. Studying the micro-dynamic peer control interactions revealed that Product Owners (1) confronted peers to quickly finish high-quality work for the customer, (2) provided peers unsolicited advice about how they should execute their work, and (3) directed peers. They legitimized their coercive control as they enjoyed information advantages and profited from the ambiguity of their role. Unexpectedly, peers responded perceptively to being controlled. They responded by taking conditional responsibility for the task at hand; when peers received unsolicited advice or instructions, they tended to agree; and directive statements were (sarcastically) laughed away. Overall, this dissertation stresses the need for studying how peers perceive and respond to their team members’ behavioral processes, as this will have considerable repercussions for how well the team performs.

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