What's the Point? Finding Meaning at Work.

Abstract

The goal of this research was to examine cognitive job crafting in relation to its associated antecedents and outcomes. More specifically, this cross-sectional study examined whether personality traits, specifically extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience, may lead to work engagement and creative performance, through the process of cognitive job crafting. A sample of 121 employed individuals in the Netherlands were recruited using the snowball sampling method. While controlling for age and gender, multiple regression analyses and mediation analyses using PROCESS macro with bootstrapping (5000 samples) were conducted to test the hypotheses. The traits extraversion and conscientiousness were found to predict cognitive job crafting, while openness to experience showed no predictive role in this relationship. As expected, cognitive job crafting proved to have strong associations with both work engagement and creative performance. By investigating these relationships, this study sheds light on the relevance of cognitive job crafting and personality factors in facilitating positive organisational outcomes.