Job crafting: empowering employees to achieve work-life balance

Details

Supervisors

Ajzen

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en gestion des ressources humaines, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

In a world where work takes up to 50% of our waking time, work-life balance matters more than ever (Pendleton et al., 2021). Moreover, our literature review raises that work-life balance can benefit more than just the worker, it can also benefit organisations. However, this work shows that work-life balance has its backsides and that men and women do not experience it the same way. Indeed, men tend avoid using work-life balance policies because they fear for their career (Blithe, 2018). While women use these policies but still end up with more unpaid working hours than men (Wajcman, 2015). Further with the idea of work-life balance, this work develops the notion of job crafting as employee-driven mechanisms to achieve balance at work between the elements that give workers joy and the ones that destroy it (Pendleton et al., 2021). Job crafting is divided into four dimensions: physical, task, relational, and cognitive crafting which all represent a different way how work can bring joy (or not) to a worker (Pendleton et al., 2021). At the end of this literature review we therefore asked ourselves the following question: “To what extent enabling job crafting may lead to work-life balance? A gender perspective.” To answer that question, interviews tackling job crafting, its dimensions and work-life balance were led. Indeed, face-to-face interviews were conducted with ten engineers from the same department and different hierarchical level within a company from the space industry. It is important to note that the company counts 70% of men for 30% of women, making it a rather masculine company. Therefore, the study was also conducted from a gender perspective. First, the results of the interviews brought an additional dimension to the gender issue of work-life balance. Indeed, some respondents were in a situation of caregiver which led them to oversee everything in their private sphere. Therefore, the gender issue was confirmed by the results moreover, the notion of caregiver raised in our results strengthened the idea that caregiver have more unpaid hours than non-caregivers. Secondly the results have shown that in the case of the studied company, job crafting helps improve work-life balance. However, enabling job crafting requires some conditions. These conditions were not all met in the studied company according to our results. However, it has been shown through this work that allowing work flexibility to employees helps them achieve balance. Nevertheless, heavy workloads and stressful environment do not create the optimal conditions to enable job crafting which requires a psychologically safe environment, control, permission to craft, and the capacity to craft. Finally, this study has helped understand that job crafting can be a great tool to achieve balance if it is used appropriately. Moreover, the gender issues have been confirmed but we have brought the notion of caregiver which is important to understand nowadays as family behaviour has been reshaped during the last 50 years in Europe with an increase of divorces (Sobotka & Berghammer, 2021). Indeed, more and more single fathers might find themselves in a situation of caregivers, involving them to combine both work and private on their own.