Job and Off-Job Crafting Profiles and the Long-Term Workload-Recovery Association: Risks for Least Active Crafters

Abstract

Chronic high workloads heighten the need for recovery yet simultaneously undermine it. This ‘recovery paradox’ threatens long-term well-being. Proactive self-initiated crafting may buffer this paradox. Individuals differ in their crafting effort allocation across life domains (i.e., job and off-job crafting profiles), and the role of distinct crafting combinations across life domains for recovery is still unknown. In this study, we assessed the moderating role of such crafting profiles for the long-term workload-recovery association. We hypothesized that employees reporting higher crafting efforts in both life domains experience a more favorable association between workload and recovery experiences over a three-month period than employees reporting fewer crafting efforts. Latent profiles analysis (LPA) was applied to identify crafting profiles in a sample of N = 2,124 German-speaking employees. The long-term association between workload and recovery experiences was examined using two-wave full cross-lagged modeling. Further differences between the crafting profiles identified were investigated with multigroup and auxiliary analyses. We found three crafting profiles: Least Active, Average, and Active Crafters, for which crafting efforts increase in parallel in both life domains with overlapping variances for its facets. Our analyses showed a long-term association between workload and detachment, relaxation, and control for the full sample and for the Least Active Crafters only within the multigroup analyses. Additionally, the Least Active Crafters reported the poorest recovery experiences at Wave 2, suggesting them as the main target of crafting and/or recovery interventions to maintain their well-being. Further characteristics of this at-risk group should be examined in future research.