Ideas with Impact
UNB Faculty of Management

Contemporary modes of work and professional success are changing rapidly due to a combination of social and technological factors. People are working jobs with new roles and increasingly digitized tasks in new industries and occupations, and in new regions or countries. These situations create instances of professional and cultural misfit that workers must overcome to achieve positive personal and professional work outcomes.

A team of researchers from the Faculty of Management, comprising Dr. Patrick Bruning and Dr. Hsin-Chen Lin, has been awarded an Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Their project seeks to understand how people use the self-management strategy of job crafting to develop and calibrate ways to reduce work misfit and positively influence one’s motivation, well-being, performance, and career success.

Job crafting is a behavioural process whereby people make focused and ongoing changes to the ways they do their jobs. Previous research has shown that, with appropriate competencies and autonomy, people can craft their jobs in ways that benefit their motivation, well-being, performance, work process innovation, and career development. While not every “crafter” employs actions and strategies that benefit all, or even some of these outcomes, many do. Thus, job crafting has become a core proactive behaviour that facilitates contemporary work objectives focused on excellence and value creation. This potential for worker-led process innovation prompted the research to better understand how people can effectively manage contemporary misfits in ways that have broad implications for making them more engaged, personally fulfilled, productive, and professionally secure.

The team has an ongoing program of research describing how aspects of people’s job crafting strategies relate to their performance, well-being, work process innovation, and career development. The newly funded research will integrate these findings to explain how workers can create effective personalized solutions to the misfits they experience. More clarity on these strategies could provide insights for reducing contemporary tensions between satisfaction and productivity, and for enhancing career development that better leverages people’s competencies and interests.

Dr. Bruning is a Professor of Business Administration within UNB’s Faculty of Management who specializes in work behaviour. He teaches courses on organizational behaviour, motivation, and leadership, where he incorporates developing insights on job crafting. Dr. Lin is a Professor of Marketing in UNB’s Faculty of Management and provides complementary expertise in cross-cultural studies, digitized interactions and communication, and quantitative research methods. She teaches courses on global marketing, social media marketing, and marketing management, where students actively craft customized marketing initiatives for specific cultural and organizational contexts. Both members’ research has been published and presented in research directed towards both academic and practitioner audiences.