Crafting for Health: A Longitudinal Study of Job and Off-Job Crafting Changes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

We examined the association between changes in employee job and off-job crafting and their self-rated health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we investigated how these associations differed across sample subgroups, contrasting differences in work location, living situation, and contractual changes (short-time work). We used four waves of a longitudinal dataset surveying NTotal = 783 German-speaking employees from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria from 2019 to 2021. We applied latent change score modeling and multigroup analyses to investigate our research questions. Results indicated that the mean job and off-job crafting and self-rated health trajectories remained relatively stable. However, we observed significant interindividual variance in job and off-job crafting changes. We found a consistent small positive relationship between crafting changes in both life domains over time, indicating that employees tended to change their crafting efforts similarly across domains. Additionally, job crafting increases between Waves 1 and 2 were linked to higher subsequent self-rated health at Wave 2, and similarly, off-job crafting increases between Waves 3 and 4 were linked to higher self-rated health at Wave 4. We observed only minor differences in this pattern across subgroups. Our results show how adaptive changes in crafting are linked to broader interindividual health differences and help identify groups who are not able to increase crafting during crises and thus could benefit from targeted support. Crafting can be an effective individual strategy for maintaining health, complementing organizational and public health measures. We encourage future research to incorporate temporal and contextual phenomena into crafting research.