Job Crafting and Personal Development in the Workplace: Employees and Managers Co-Creating Meaningful and Productive Work in Personal Development Discussions

Positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship research shows that through job crafting employees can proactively make their work more engaging and meaningful and thus increase their overall well-being and performance. Organizations can support such employee efforts and benefit from a highly engaged, committed, high performing and innovative workforce. The goal of this Capstone is to propose an organization intervention that combines job crafting and personal development planning practice in organizations to support employees and managers in co-crafting meaningful and productive work in their current or future jobs. The new Personal Development Crafting practice could help employees and their managers to craft task, relational, and cognitive aspects of their jobs, increase ‘calling’ work orientation, imagine new futures, and work towards personal and organizational goals. Furthermore, when employees engage in job crafting on their own, unwanted consequences could ensue, such as misalignment with organizational goals. Having managers participate in job crafting could help prevent such outcomes.