The Hong Kong U. of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
Job crafting is an important self-focused proactive behavior. While previous research has highlighted the role of leadership in shaping employee job crafting, two key limitations exist. First, it has predominantly focused on leadership styles, neglecting leaders’ reactions to various forms of employee proactivity and their consequent impacts on employee job crafting. Second, it has not distinguished between different orientations of job crafting, leading to an incomplete understanding of how leaders influence distinct job crafting behaviors. To obtain an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how leaders affect employees’ job crafting, this paper examines the impact of managerial voice endorsement, as a positive managerial response to employees’ proactivity, on employees’ engagement in promotion- and prevention-oriented job crafting and elucidates the associated mechanisms. Through two multi-wave field studies, we found that managerial voice endorsement is positively related to promotion-oriented job crafting via status and negatively related to prevention-oriented job crafting via cynicism. In addition, a lower rather than a higher leader-member exchange relationship strengthens the positive indirect effect of managerial voice endorsement on promotion-oriented job crafting via status. This paper expands on existing knowledge by investigating how, why, and when employees craft jobs as a reaction to managerial voice endorsement.
