When career dissatisfaction leads to employee job crafting: The role of job social support and occupational self-efficacy

Abstract

Purpose

Career dissatisfaction can be defined as an unpleasant or a negative emotional state that results from the appraisal of one’s career. This negative affective appraisal might motivate an individual to take actions to improve the situation. This paper examines career dissatisfaction as a trigger for employee job crafting in terms of altering the task and the relational boundaries of the work.

Methodology/methodology/approach

The paper further theorizes that employee contextual resource (i.e., job social support) and personal resource (i.e., occupational self-efficacy) will interact with career dissatisfaction to result in job crafting. Two-wave data were collected from a sample of 246 Chinese employees.

Findings

As hypothesized, employees with career dissatisfaction exhibited the highest levels of task and relational job crafting when they received adequate support from coworkers and supervisors and were confident about their occupational abilities.

Originality/value

The findings suggest that under certain conditions employee career dissatisfaction could be transformed into proactive work behavior (i.e., job crafting).

Citation

Wang, H.-j., Chen, X. and Lu, C.-q. (2020), "When career dissatisfaction leads to employee job crafting: The role of job social support and occupational self-efficacy", Career Development International, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 337-354. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-03-2019-0069