Job crafting and employees’ general health the role of work–nonwork facilitation and perceived

Shi et al. BMC Public Health (2022) 22:1196

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13569-z

RESEARCH

Job crafting and employees’ general

health: the role of work–nonwork facilitation

and perceived boundary control

Yanwei Shi1†, Dan Li2†, Nan Zhang3

, Ping Jiang4*, Deng Yuling5*, Julan Xie6 and Jun Yang2

Abstract

Background: Job crafting is associated with positive work–related outcomes, but its efects on nonwork–related

outcomes are unclear. The conservation of resources theory informed the hypotheses that work–nonwork facilita￾tion mediates the relationship between job crafting and general health, and this mediation process is moderated by

perceived boundary control.

Methods: Using a two–wave design, 383 employees from a range of work settings completed questionnaires in

which they rated job crafting, work–nonwork facilitation, general health and perceived boundary control.

Results: Moderated mediation analysis showed that work–nonwork facilitation mediated the relationship between

job crafting and employee general health. Further, perceived boundary control moderated this indirect efect, such

that the indirect efect was stronger for employees with high perceived boundary control than those with low per￾ceived boundary control.

Conclusions: This study is an important step forward in understanding the efect of job crafting on nonwork

domains, and in clarifying “how” and “when” job crafting might afect employees’ general health. Further, the results

have practical implications for fostering employee general health.

Keywords: Conservation of resources theory, General health, Job crafting, Perceived boundary control, Work–

nonwork facilitation

© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which

permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the

original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or

other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line

to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory

regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this

licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco

mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Background

In times of rapid organizational change, employees often

need to take initiative to change the conditions of their

existing jobs [1, 2]. Job crafting, which refers to self–ini￾tiated changes in one’s job or workplace, has received

increasing attention from researchers and practitioners

[3, 4]. Job crafting involves changes that employees make

in their job demands and job resources to attain and/

or optimize their personal or work goals, such as seek￾ing social support and starting new projects [2]. Tims

et  al. suggested that it has four dimensions: increasing

structural job resources, increasing social job resources,

increasing challenging job demands, and decreasing

hindering job demands [2]. Job crafting appears to have

a positive efect on various work–related attitudes and

behaviors, such as improved job performance [5, 6],

increased work engagement [6, 7], work meaningfulness

[8], and job satisfaction [9, 10].

However, compared to the extensive literature on the

efect of job crafting on work–related outcomes [6, 8,

Open Access

†

Yanwei Shi and Dan Li contributed equally to the study. They should be

regarded as joint frst authors.

*Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected]

4

Department of Nursing, Shanghai Pudong New area People’s Hospital,

Shanghai 201299, China 5

Health Management Center, the Third Xiangya Hospital, Central South

University, Changsha 410083, China

Full list of author information is available at the end of the article