Are you facing increasing job demands at work?
You can engage in two job crafting strategies to make changes in your job demands:
1️⃣Reducing demands, where you would avoid or reduce demanding tasks and relationships, 2️⃣Optimising demands, where you simplify or optimise work methods or processes to improve work efficiency and therefore lower your experienced demands.
Reducing demands is withdrawal-oriented and has been found dysfunctional while optimising demands is more functional and effective.
In this new paper, we found that when individuals saw a job demand as a challenge, they felt more control over the demanding situation, hence were more likely to use optimising demands as a strategy.
To encourage employees to use job crafting strategies that lead to positive outcomes, organisations and managers should pay attention to whether employees perceive the job demands as challenges or hindrances.
New paper: Reducing demands or optimizing demands? Effects of cognitive appraisal and autonomy on job crafting to change one’s work demands, by Fangfang Zhang and Sharon K Parker: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1359432X.2022.2032665