Employees in work environments with excessive job demands and high task interdependence face a dilemma: while job crafting helps them decrease emotional exhaustion, these self-initiated changes to their jobs negatively affect coworkers. Through qualitative interviews with 89 employees working for several agile teams in a European automotive corporation, we explore how employees experience and navigate this dilemma. Our findings reveal that the extreme demands of multiple team membership (MTM) in agile work processes exhaust employees emotionally, leading them to reduce their exhaustion through three avoidance crafting strategies: eliminating tasks, reducing task investment, and scheduling tasks in uninterrupted time blocks. These strategies place a burden on coworkers and slow team processes, resulting in substantial social tensions. We identify two pathways for navigating this dilemma: a self-oriented approach, in which employees prioritize their self-preservation and make unilateral decisions, and a prosocial approach, in which they consider coworkers’ perspectives and seek a balance between self-preservation and the needs of others. Our study fosters a deep, contextualized understanding of avoidance crafting under excessive job demands and contributes to the emerging discourse on socially embedded job crafting. Additionally, our research enriches both the job crafting and MTM literature with a process perspective and advances MTM research by highlighting the proactive role individuals play in managing MTM demands.
