“Stop trying to find meaningful work, create it instead” “

Abstract

Job crafting has been shown as an important mechanism to increase work engagement, but the underlying processes have received little attention. The current study is among the first to examine whether meaningful work functions as a mediator in the relationship between job crafting and work engagement. Also the moderating role of age on the relationship between job crafting, meaningful work and work engagement is examined. A total of 378 white-collar employees working in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden completed an online survey to assess their work experiences. Results showed that meaningful work partially mediated the relationship between three different subscales of job crafting and work engagement. For age, non-significant results were found which might be due to the fact that because of anonymity requirements, age was measured as a categorical variable. It is concluded that crafting social job resources, crafting structural job resources, crafting challenging job demands and meaningful work are important mechanisms to increase work engagement and that both organizations and employees can benefit from the insights of this study.