Emotional job crafting: Conceptual development, antecedents, and consequences

This thesis investigates how employees navigate emotional job demands (EJD) through two complementary studies. Study 1 employs the critical incident technique (CIT) to understand the underlying mechanisms by which employees cope with emotional job demands (EJD). We conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposively selected sample (N =15). The data analysis led to the development of an emotional job crafting model that integrates EJDs, emotional resources, and coping strategies, which we refer to as emotional job crafting strategies, and employee outcomes, alongside depicting the underlying mechanisms that explain their interrelations. Study 2 was designed to examine the underlying motivational mechanisms of one of the counterintuitive findings revealed in Study 1: the enactment of job crafting to navigate abusive supervision before leaving an organization. Adopting a scenario-based experimental design, data were collected from 247 participants. The findings revealed that abusive supervision elicits negative affect that attenuates promotion-oriented but augments prevention-oriented job crafting, which in turn cultivates turnover intention. Moreover, we found that perfectionistic concerns exacerbate the relationships among abusive supervision, negative affect, prevention-oriented job crafting, and turnover intention. However, perfectionistic strivings show no moderating effect. Overall, this thesis has advanced theoretical understanding and guided practical insights by revealing the strategies employees utilize in response to EJDs.