Exploring the relationship between job crafting and resilience

Abstract

Orientation: Employees undertake self-initiated processes like job crafting to reshape their work. Within financial services organisations where work is characterised by high pressure and demanding conditions, assessing relationships between job crafting and resilience becomes particularly interesting.

Research purpose: To investigate the relationships between job crafting and resilience, and how these variables influence one another in a financial services organisation.

Motivation for the study: Limited research has examined job crafting’s role in fostering resilience, particularly in South Africa’s financial services sector.

Research approach/design and method: A positivist, quantitative, cross-sectional design was employed, utilising survey data from 332 financial services employees (convenience sample). Pearson correlations and multiple regression analyses examined the relationships between job crafting dimensions and resilience.

Main findings: The study identified positive correlations between all three dimensions of job crafting and resilience. Among the crafting dimensions, cognitive crafting demonstrated the strongest association with resilience, followed by task and relational crafting. The findings indicated that employees who engage in job crafting tend to exhibit higher levels of resilience, which suggests that job crafting can play a key role in helping employees cope with challenges at work.

Practical/managerial implications: The results suggest that organisations can foster greater resilience by encouraging job crafting, particularly cognitive crafting. Human Resource professionals can integrate job crafting into well-being initiatives and offer training that helps employees reshape tasks to enhance meaning and engagement. Managers should also create an environment that supports job crafting behaviours, enabling employees to tailor their roles to align with their personal strengths and values.

Contribution/value add: This study contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between job crafting and resilience in the South African context. It provides practical insights for organisations seeking to improve employee resilience, particularly in high-pressure industries like financial services.