Crafting Jobs for Sustaining Careers during China’s Manufacturing Digitalization

Abstract

Accelerated digitalization coupled with ever-growing new job demands in China’s manufacturing industry has led to serious concerns about rising work stress and the loss of the sustainability of careers among production workers. They are trapped within an organization due to the lack of career alternatives in the labor market; under such occupational stress, some proactive workers may engage in expansive job crafting (JC) behaviors to get more resources to meet their career goals and make better career plans. As a result, this paper aims to investigate how Chinese manufacturing workers perform JC behaviors to translate perceived work stress into more control over their careers in today’s shrinking job market. Drawing on the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, this study thus investigates how employee continuance commitment (CC), as a manifestation of work stress, influences career control that can reflect the sustainability of careers in such a turbulent time and how the three dimensions of employees’ JC (i.e., increasing structural job resources, increasing social job resources, and increasing challenging job demands) mediate the CC‒career control relationship, respectively. A time-lagged survey was carried out with a sample of 476 Chinese production workers. The results show that crafting jobs is instrumental in translating the degree of CC that embodies the level of work stress to the degree of career sustainability during the digital transformation of Chinese manufacturing. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications. Limitations and their implications for future studies are also reviewed.

Be in Your Element: The Joint Effect of Human Resource Management Strength and Proactive Personality on Employee Creativity

“…In the early stage of career construction, employees are more likely to promote job development by increasing challenging job demands. Expansive JC in terms of increasing job resources and challenging job demands should stimulate personal growth, development, and adaptability ( Tims and Bakker, 2010 ; Maggiori et al, 2013 ; Akkermans and Tims, 2017 ) and help employees establish a more positive and stable emotional status at work ( Xu et al, 2020 ), such as CA. CA is a cumulative outcome, a consequence of behaviors being amplified over a relatively long period ( Seibert et al, 1999 ), previous studies have suggested that specific exercises and deliberate practice serve as important learning behaviors in the adaptation process ( Mei et al, 2021 ).…”

Crafting Jobs for Occupational Satisfaction and Innovation among Manufacturing Workers Facing the COVID-19 Crisis

“…Future research may seek to identify more alternative mediators. For instance, it would be rather interesting to take psychological capital into consideration, as it is a critical personal resource (i.e., hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism) that reflects a built-in creative tendency of individuals to develop multiple pathways for accomplishing their career goals and producing a variety of positive workplace outcomes [2,51,54].…”

The significance of employee behaviours and soft management practices to avoid digital waste during a digital transformation

“…Manufacturing employees may feel stress related to digitalization and growing job demands. The engagement into the job crafting can lead behaviors to get more resources to meet their career goals and make better career plans (Xu et al , 2020). Employees from both companies mostly agree that the digital transformation process has had a positive influence on individual career goals.…”