پروفایل های ایجاد فرصت شغلی و تعامل کاری: یک رویکرد محور شخصیت Job crafting profiles and work engagement: A person-centered approach

1. Introduction Job crafting, defined as the proactive customization of one’s job demands and resources (Tims & Bakker, 2010; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2012), enables employees to adjust their work environment to suit their preferences. A work environment that has been individually optimized leads the employee to feel energized and devoted at work. It has been widely recognized that work engagement, i.e., a positive, fulfilling and consistent state of mind characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption (Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá, & Bakker, 2002) increases in a work environment that offers enough of both job resources and challenges (Bakker, 2011; Brough et al., 2013; for reviews, see Halbesleben, 2010; Mauno, Kinnunen, Mäkikangas, & Feldt, 2010). The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Bakker, Demerouti, & Sanz-Vergel, 2014), used in this study, posits that job crafting occurs via four behaviors (Tims & Bakker, 2010), meaning that job demands and resources can be modified by employee efforts to increase structural (e.g., opportunities for personal development) and social (e.g., feedback from colleagues and supervisor) job resources. Individuals can also make their job demands more challenging (e.g., by starting new projects) and less hindering (e.g., reducing the cognitive demands of the job) (Tims & Bakker, 2010). These job crafting behaviors have been widely investigated since the development of the Job Crafting Scale (JCS) in 2012 (Tims et al., 2012). Despite the extensive research, the empirical work on job crafting has thus far been variable-oriented, i.e., focused on the relations of job crafting strategies as independent factors, and thus ignored the possibility that employees might use different job crafting strategies simultaneously. For instance, some employees might be ‘active crafters’, using a variety of job crafting behaviors, whereas others might be ‘passive crafters’, not using any job crafting behaviors to any marked extent or just focusing on reducing their job demands. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate job crafting as a multidimensional behavioral pattern to gain insight into whether, and if so how, different job crafting behaviors combine within employees to form different job crafting profiles. Consequently, the first contribution of the study is the investigation of job crafting behavior from a person-centered perspective (see Bergman, Magnusson, & El-Khouri, 2003; Mäkikangas & Kinnunen, 2016; Wang & Hagnes, 2011), a topic that has not previously received research attention.