How Career Crafting Promotes Employee Well-being: The Role of Professional and Organizational Identification

Abstract

In the contemporary world of work, individuals are arguably increasingly responsible for maintaining the longevity of their careers. Recently, the concept of career crafting has emerged to describe how individuals may proactively shape their career paths, for example, by developing professional skills to remain employable in the uncertain labor markets. However, career crafting is empirically understudied, which limits its application to employee well-being practices. In the present study, we draw on the social identity approach to hypothesize that an increase in career crafting fosters increases in professional (PI) and organizational (OI) identification. In turn, increases in PI and OI lead to an increase in work engagement, a decrease in job boredom, and a decrease in burnout. We analyzed two-wave longitudinal survey data from the Finnish working population (n = 842) collected in 2021 and 2022. Most of our hypotheses were supported, as the latent change score modeling revealed that an increase in career crafting was associated with an increase in work engagement and a decrease in burnout via increases in PI and OI. However, an increase in career crafting was associated with a decrease in job boredom via increases in OI, but not via PI. Our study suggests that career crafting is a viable addition to the bottom-up approach to job design and encourages organizations to invest resources in employees’ career crafting to foster their psychological attachment to work-relevant groups and, consequently, their well-being.