How Job Crafting Enhance Work Engagement? - Effects of Role Ambiguity and ICT Presenteeism -

Individuals’ initiatives have been stressed in the workplace due to the rapid changes of the market. Job crafting refers to individuals’ proactive behavior that extends and modifies their work boundaries regarding tasks, cognition, and relationships. Prior studies have explored the effects of job crafting on individual employees. Work engagement is considered as a crucial outcome of job crafting. However, very few studies have investigated how job crafting affects work engagement. A major change in the current work environment is that tasks have become very complex, and the use of ICT in their performance is common. In this study, we classified job crafting as task crafting, cognitive crafting, and relational crafting, and explored the roles of role ambiguity caused by the complexity of tasks and ICT presenteeism in the process of these three crafting behaviors affecting work engagement. Results indicate that role ambiguity acts as a mediating mechanism between two job crafting behaviors (cognitive and relational crafting) and work engagement. In addition, they show that ICT presenteeism significantly interacted with cognitive crafting, further amplifying the effect of job crafting on role ambiguity. The results of this study can help companies develop strategies that can maximize the positive impact of job crafting.