Until now, the relationship between task crafting as a bottom-up, employee-led process of job design, and career development, has not been examined. This is despite both task crafting and career development having common motivations, and compatible antecedents, and despite career development theories integrating the principles of proactivity and adaptability that are fundamental behaviours in task crafting.
The purpose of this thesis was to examine whether employees who make specific, self-initiated task related changes to their work tasks achieve more positive career outcomes, evidenced by promotion. The thesis also examined contextual and behavioural correlates of task crafting to contribute towards building a more coherent picture of how task crafting can be enabled and utilised to enhance career development.
Adopting a positivist methodological position, a quantitative survey was developed and completed by 241 university employees. The survey measured task crafting, autonomy, uncertainty, quality of employees’ relationships with their managers (Leader Member Exchange LMX), and a ‘climate for crafting’. For outcomes, respondents reported whether they had been promoted in the last six months. Six months later, respondents again reported on whether they had been promoted, embedding a time-lagged design into the study.
Logistic regression showed that task crafting at time 1 increased the likelihood of promotion at time 2. Structural equation modelling analysis showed that each of the study variables were positively associated with task crafting, although not as originally hypothesised.
The findings contribute to career development theory by providing a specific mechanism by which employees can take action to change their job design, and thus improve their promotion prospects. The findings enhance job crafting theory by adding to known information on correlates and outcomes of task crafting, leading to a call for more research into the separate processes of job crafting and to a call for a re-examination of motivations for job and task crafting.
