Job Crafting for Tourism Employees: Conceptual Overview, Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences

Introduction

Healthy and engaged employees tend to perform better, have higher levels of productivity and are generally happier in their works. An employee who has negative feelings about well-being and low engagement tend to bring down organization culture, productivity and profitability (Tims, Bakker and Derks, 2013: 231). When employees feel that they have no contribution on their role at their company, they have trouble staying engaged and feeling satisfied at work (Cheng and Yi, 2018: 79). The concept of job crafting, which was introduced to the literature in the 2000s, began to be used in the recovery, loyalty and happiness of the employees from their workplaces. The concept aims to help employees to transform their mindset to focus more on the purpose of their roles (Tims, Bakker and Derks, 2014: 490). Employees act as “job crafters” taking initiative to identify where changes or adjustments within their job description are practicable and desirable (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001: 179). It gives them a practical and easy way to find opportunities to feel more engaged fulfilled, effective and well-being at work. Therefore, they want to experience and accomplish new things. Employers can help facilitate this by allowing employees to make some changes in their tasks and interactions with co-workers or customers at work. Job crafting helps employees change their jobs to better suit their talent and skills, thereby increasing their job satisfaction (Tims, Bakker and Derks, 2013: 231).

Psychological empowerment and emotional well-being do not motivate employees enough, but job crafting leads to increased psychological capital, satisfaction, and attachment to the job and enables mobility into new roles thus encouraging overall performance (Chen, Yen and Tsai, 2014: 22). Crafting in a job purpose doesn't involve any actual changes in the content of employees’ work, and while this can add to their enjoyment of work. These behaviors enable the employees to feel that he/she is in control of their job and to establish an effective connection with other employees and also proactively create meaning, interest and satisfaction in their work (Forbes, 2011). In today's world, job requirements and working conditions are constantly changing. One way to ensure employee motivation is to improve working conditions and redesign employees' work. Recently, firms have begun to adopt redesign approaches for job roles at all levels in the workplace (Le Blanc, Demerouti and Bakker, 2017: 48-49). Job crafting is relatively a new concept in the literature, but it reinforces the sense of meaning of employees’ work and expresses a proactive behavior. With this behavior, the employees shape their jobs according to themselves, make their work more meaningful, take care of their business, adapt their tasks with their own talent and interests and make changes such as arranging their relations with other employees. In this chapter, the subject of job crafting will be discussed in the context of tourism employees. The tourism industry has many sub-sectors within itself, and various professional and business requirements can be mentioned. It is also safe to state that there are relatively few works in the context of job crafting literature in the tourism industry. Therefore, we believe, this chapter will be an important contribution to understand the concept in the tourism industry.