Leader–member exchange fosters work engagement: The mediating role of job crafting

Abstract

Orientation: The right balance between job demands and job resources are essential for employees to bring energy and enthusiasm to work. Employees who experience high-quality relationships with their supervisors may actively craft their job demands and job resources and feel more engaged.Research purpose: The current study examined the associations between leader–member exchange (LMX), job crafting and work engagement. Motivation: This study attempts to gain more insight in the associations between LMX, job crafting and work engagement. It was hypothesised that high-quality relationships with supervisors fosters work engagement because it stimulates employees to craft their jobs by increasing social and structural job resources and challenging job demands and by decreasing hindering job demands.Research approach, design and methodology: Participants (N = 402) working for a leading mail and parcels company in the Netherlands completed questionnaires measuring LMX, work engagement and job crafting. Structural equation modelling was used to examine the hypotheses.Main findings: Increasing social job resources (β = 0.01, SE = 0.00, p < 0.001) and increasing challenging job demands (β = 0.08, SE = 0.04, p < 0.05) were significant mediators in the association between LMX and work engagement. Increasing structural job resources (β = 0.00, SE = 0.00, p = 0.92) and decreasing hindering job demands (β = -0.00, SE 0.00, p = 0.09) were not significant mediators.Practical and managerial implications: Supervisors who are capable of building high-quality relationships with their employees based on trust, respect and loyalty will foster a positive, fulfilling work-related state of mind among employees because they are more willing to proactively craft a challenging and resourceful work environment.Contribution or value-add: The findings of this study showed the importance of high-quality relationships with supervisors and were unique in examining the association between LMX and job crafting.

Discerning Work as a Calling: The Role of Job Crafting

“…Future studies should delve more into the quality of employee‐supervisor relationships, or leader‐member exchanges, that are characterized by a high degree of mutual trust, respect, and obligation. Leaders who provide a high level of job resources for their followers, especially in the form of autonomy, social support, and positive feedback (Breevaart, Bakker, Demerou, & van den Heuvel, 2015; Radstaak & Hennes, 2017), may motivate employees to proactively search for or shape various experiences to find their calling.…”

Reorienting job crafting research: A hierarchical structure of job crafting concepts and integrative review

“…For example, high commitment human resource management, which includes practices such as extensive training, empowerment, and participation in decision-making, has been indicated to positively related to approach crafting (Meijerink, Bos-Nehles, & de Leede, 2018). Similarly, empirical and meta-analytic studies have found a positive relationship between approach crafting and good work design, which includes features such as job autonomy (Kim, Im, & Qu, 2018;Rudolph et al, 2017), job enlargement (Berdicchia, Nicolli, & Masino, 2016), opportunity for professional development (Nipper, van Wingerden, & Poell, 2018), task identity, task significance (Kim & Lee, 2016), feedback, social support, leadermember exchange (Berdicchia & Masino, 2017;Gordon, Demerouti, Le Blanc, & Bipp, 2015;Radstaak & Hennes, 2017), and skill utilization (Cullinane, Bosak, Flood, & Demerouti, 2017). In addition, Cullinane et al (2017) indicated that the positive relationship between daily skill utilization and approach resources crafting was stronger when employees had high boundary control and low task interdependence in their general roles.…”

How coworkers attribute, react to, and shape job crafting

“…In this category, researchers have also applied a behavioral modeling framework (Bandura, 1986) to theorize and show that job crafting behaviors can be imitated by coworkers (e.g., Bakker et al, 2016;Demerouti & Peeters, 2018). Finally, researchers have investigated the role of leadership as an antecedent of job crafting, including servant leadership (Bavik et al, 2017;Harju et al, 2018), employee-oriented leadership (Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2018b), transformational leadership (Hetland et al, 2018), and the quality of the leader-member exchange relationship (Radstaak & Hennes, 2017). These studies mostly show a positive relationship between a supportive leadership style and approach forms of job crafting, but they provide limited evidence that leadership style affects avoidance crafting.…”