I Can't Split Myself in Two (or Five): Job Crafting in Highly Demanding and Interdependent Work Environments

Abstract

Employees in highly demanding, interdependent work environments face a dilemma: while avoidance-focused job crafting can preserve their own well-being, these self-initiated changes to their jobs could negatively affect coworkers. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 81 employees concurrently working for multiple agile teams in a European automotive corporation, we explore how employees navigate this dilemma. Our findings reveal three primary job crafting strategies—eliminating tasks, reducing task investment, and scheduling tasks in uninterrupted time blocks—that decrease employees' emotional exhaustion yet burden coworkers and slow team processes. We identify two distinct pathways for navigating this dilemma: in self-oriented job crafting, employees announce their strategies unilaterally and implement them despite coworkers' objections, shifting the burden of interdependence onto coworkers and fueling coworker frustration; in prosocial job crafting, they openly suggest crafting strategies, discuss them with coworkers, and adjust plans to balance self-preservation with coworkers' needs, thus partially internalizing the burden of interdependence. Our study advances research on socially embedded job crafting by revealing contrasting ways to manage interdependence. It also extends job crafting research by showing when and why avoidance crafting can effectively mitigate high job demands and by illustrating how avoidance and approach crafting can blend within a single strategy.