Job Crafting for the Future of Work: Should We Leverage Strengths or Seek Growth?
In today’s hybrid and high-change work world, a fresh study by researchers from Curtin University, Monash University, and Beijing Normal University brings a timely lens to an old question: How should employees proactively reshape their work to thrive?
Key Insight: Not all job crafting is created equal.
The study introduces a compelling distinction between job crafting towards strengths (playing to what we already do well—“exploitation”) and job crafting towards development (pushing boundaries and learning new skills—“exploration”). Over a 10-day daily diary study of 115 employees, the authors uncovered powerful and nuanced patterns:
Findings at a Glance:
Strengths-based crafting significantly boosts task performance—it's your best bet for reliable, high-quality output.
Development-focused crafting drives creative performance—think innovation and fresh thinking.
Job autonomy empowers strengths-based crafting—but only when employees feel their performance is tightly tied to pay.
Surprisingly, autonomy didn’t significantly spark developmental crafting—suggesting that risk-taking needs more than just freedom; it may need psychological safety or a culture that tolerates mistakes.
Why This Matters for Leaders:
If your organization prizes operational excellence, help people double down on their strengths—and link rewards to output.
If you’re chasing innovation, design for experimentation—and consider uncoupling pay from near-term results.
One-size-fits-all job design or reward structures may be holding back your team’s true potential.
Shared Safety and Risk’s psychosocial risk identification work with clients has clearly shown the potential stress impacts of job design and autonomy on workers. Looking at the design and systems of work to enable crafting is a key, before we consider ‘lower order’ controls.
This research and our client work underscores the importance of aligning job design, autonomy, and incentive structures with your strategic goals. Whether your focus is performance today or innovation tomorrow, how you empower people to craft their work can make all the difference.
If you're interested in how job crafting can support performance, innovation, and psychological safety in your workplace, reach out to us at Shared Safety and Risk. We’d love to explore how these insights can shape your organisation’s future of work. Contact us at info@sharedsafetyandrisk.com.au.
