Top-Down and Bottom-Up Work Design: A Multilevel Perspective on How Job Crafting and Work Characteristics Interrelate

Abstract

To date, there is surprisingly little empirical attention investigating how job crafting and work characteristics influence each other over time. But this matters because we know how powerful both work characteristics and the process of job crafting can be for important outcomes like job performance, engagement, and burnout. We propose a multilevel approach to understanding the interlinking of job crafting behaviors and cognitions with work characteristics. Specifically, we suggest that work characteristics operate in a top-down process to constrain or enable job crafting behaviors and cognitions, whereas job crafting behaviors and cognitions emerge over time via a bottom-up process to achieve a change in work characteristics. We review existing empirical evidence on these pathways but, since such research is scarce, we focus especially on identifying unanswered questions and future directions. To conclude, we recommend ways that these processes might be empirically captured, and advocate for attention to the possibility of virtuous spirals, or debilitating negative spirals, of these two powerful sets of variables.