Investigating job crafting from a prosocial perspective

Prosocial and proactive behaviours among employees have been a central issue in the study of organizations in the past 30 years due to the considerable changes that have occurred within the world of work. In order to provide greater autonomy for work teams organizations have been implementing a flatter structure. The management style of supervisors has also changed as they increasingly rely on their workforce to be proactive and introduce changes to their jobs. In parallel with the focus on proactivity, the social and prosocial aspects of work have also received increased research attention. A shift from a manufacturing to a service economy resulted in a growing number of new working relationships, in which employees can express and experience prosocial behaviours. However, there has been very limited work on combining these two emerging areas. This PhD research aims to provide a significant contribution by investigating the fruitful integration of proactive and prosocial behaviours through examining a specific form of job crafting, namely Prosocial Job Crafting (PSJC). PSJC behaviours reflect the processes through which individuals modify their jobs’ task, relational, and cognitive boundaries to allow them act in a manner that positively benefits the work and lives of colleagues and customers. The thesis includes three empirical studies. In the first two studies a new scale is developed and validated for the measurement of PSJC with two samples: sample one of 500 participants collected via Amazon Mturk, and sample two of 243 participants collected from academic libraries in the UK. The third empirical study describes the Structural Equation Modelling analysis of a conceptual model with a field sample of 262 participants from academic libraries in Hungary. Consistent with theoretical predictions, results show that task and cognitive prosocial job crafting were predicted by prosocial motivation, and task prosocial job crafting strongly and positively predicted self-report and supervisor ratings of individual performance. Implications of these findings for theory and for practice are discussed.