Article

Journal of Career Development

1-14
ª Curators of the University
Job Crafting and Intent to Leave: of Missouri 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0894845320918666

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Bogdan Oprea1 , Lucian Păduraru1, and Dragoş Iliescu1

Abstract
Managing turnover is an essential human resource practice. One of the modern approaches that could
have the potential to increase staff retention is the stimulation of employees’ job crafting, the set of
changes regarding job demands and job resources that employees proactively make. Based on self-
concept theory, we expected meaningful work and work engagement to serially mediate the nega-
tive relationship between job crafting and intent to leave. A cross-sectional study was conducted on a
sample of 235 Romanian employees who responded to questionnaires about all variables. The med-
iation hypotheses were tested with bootstrapping procedures using structural equation modeling.
Meaningful work and work engagement serially mediated the negative link between job crafting and
intent to leave. Our results suggest that implementing job crafting interventions could reduce
employees’ intentions to leave the organization. Future studies could verify whether these interven-
tions may represent a new management practice to effectively control turnover.

Keywords
job crafting, intent to leave, turnover, work engagement, meaningful work

Introduction
Managing turnover is an essential human resource practice, as high turnover rates can impact organi-
zational success in several defective ways (Heavey et al., 2013). High amounts of financial resources
are usually lost in replacing former employees (Cascio, 2006). Turnover also affects the company’s
overall performance by causing the loss of valuable knowledge, skills, and abilities (Shaw et al.,
2005) and by disrupting the existing coordination patterns between people (Summers et al., 2012).
Some researchers perceive employees as the most valuable competitive asset of organizations and con-
sider their retention to be a top priority (Cardy & Lengnick-Hall, 2011) in the “war for talent” caused
by globalization and growing competition (Harvey, 2013). Indeed, most organizations are interested in
retaining their high performers or difficult-to-replace employees (Allen et al., 2010).

1
Department of Psychology, University of Bucharest, Romania

Corresponding Author:
Bogdan Oprea, Department of Psychology, University of Bucharest, 90th Panduri Ave., Bucharest 070709, Romania.
Email: bogdanteodor.oprea@drd.unibuc.ro
2 Journal of Career Development XX(X)

The unemployment rate in Romania is approximately 4% (Eurostat, 2020). Turnover is high in

times of low unemployment (Carsten & Spector, 1987); therefore, Romanian organizations are forced
to find solutions for employee retention. Part of the employee retention strategies recommended by the
literature refers to job design for increasing meaningfulness, engagement, autonomy, variety, and cow-
orker support (Allen et al., 2010) or matching jobs to employees’ personal values and life interests to
ensure that work is interesting, challenging, and meaningful (Aguinis et al., 2012). One of the modern
approaches by which these suggestions can be implemented is through stimulation of employees’ job
crafting behaviors. Job crafting represents the changes regarding job demands (e.g., seeking interesting
and challenging new tasks) and job resources (e.g., increasing autonomy and variety) that employees
proactively make according to personal needs and interests (Tims et al., 2012). Recent studies support
a negative relationship between job crafting and intent to leave (Dominguez et al., 2018; Esteves &
Lopes, 2017; Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2016), but these studies have certain limitations related to
their samples, and they do not provide an explanatory mechanism or a theoretical framework for the
relationship between these variables.
Considering these limitations, the purpose of this study is to investigate the link between job craft-
ing and turnover intention based on self-concept theory (Shamir, 1991). This theory postulates that job
motivation comes from the congruence among employee’s self-concept, the job, and the work context
(Duchon & Plowman, 2005). Therefore, we expect the employees who craft their jobs based on their
personal needs and interests to perceive their work as being more meaningful (Wrzesniewski et al.,
2013), which in turn makes them more engaged (Bakker et al., 2016). Ultimately, their high level
of work engagement would diminish their intention to leave the organization. This article contributes
to theoretical development of turnover literature by proposing bottom-up job design as an important
factor in predicting the intentions of leaving the organization. Most theoretical approaches explain per-
sonnel turnover through embeddedness (Mitchell et al., 2001), job attitudes (Griffeth et al., 2000), or
the employees’ perceptions of their fit with the job (Carless, 2005) or organization (Hoffman & Woehr,
2006). These approaches usually regard employees as passive occupants of the jobs, ignoring their
proactive role in changing aspects of the workplace which influence their intention to leave. We
address this gap by analyzing the relationship between self-initiated job crafting behaviors and turn-
over intentions.
This study has practical implications for both organizational psychologists and vocational counse-
lors. For organizational psychologist, we explore the potential of job crafting interventions as a new
human resources management strategy for retaining valuable employees. On the other hand, career
counseling practices in Romania were described as being limited to providing occupational and labor
market information, trait-based career self-assessments, improving job search skills, and enhancing
occupational placement (Hartung, 2005). Some authors argue that this description is due to the impact
of communism on career development and education before Romania became a democratic country
(Whitmarsh & Ritter, 2007). By adopting job crafting interventions, Romanian counselor can use a
new method, adapted to the present times, to help employees decide whether they can craft their cur-
rent job based on their own preferences or whether it is more appropriate to change their career path.

Job Crafting and Intent to Leave

One of the most common approaches for reducing turnover, commonly referred to as job redesign,
focuses on modifying work activities in order to better fit the needs or preferences of employees
(Hackman, 1980). Traditionally, job redesign has been done in a top-down manner, where the manage-
ment planned a certain set of job changes and administered them to all employees in a formal manner
(Jones & Harter, 2005). As Berg et al. (2013) note, this can be referred to as a “one-size-fits-all”
approach, which implies that there is a universal solution for all employees in an organization. Unfor-
tunately, these interventions don’t always meet the desired outcomes (Oldham & Fried, 2016). This
Oprea et al. 3

might be due to various reasons including resistance (Nielsen et al., 2010) or different work prefer-
ences related to personality (Berings et al., 2004).
Considering the limitations and the risk of failure associated with top-down interventions (Aust
et al., 2010), the need for more individualized approaches has emerged, thus leading to bottom-up
redesign (Tims & Bakker, 2010). Bottom-up redesign is based on the employee’s own capacity to
modify their job boundaries in accordance with their needs and preferences (Grant & Parker, 2009).
One particular form of bottom-up redesign is job crafting (Demerouti, 2014). There are two main con-
ceptualizations of job crafting (Lichtenthaler & Fischback, 2018), but the most popular belongs to
Tims and Bakker (2010), who take a resource-based approach of the concept (Lichtenthaler & Fisch-
bach, 2018). According to their perspective, job crafting should be understood as framed in the Job
Demands-Resources model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) as reestablishing the equilibrium between
demands and resources in order to promote motivation, health, and performance (Lichtenthaler &
Fischbach, 2018). This approach proposes four fundamental ways for job crafting (Tims et al.,
2012): increasing social job resources (e.g., asking a colleague for help), increasing structural job
resources (e.g., asking for a training), increasing challenging job demands (e.g., volunteering in new
projects), and decreasing hindering job demands (e.g., communicating less with rude colleagues).
A negative connection between increasing job challenges and turnover intention was found in a
recent study (Esteves & Lopes, 2017). Increasing resources and increasing challenges are also asso-
ciated with higher motivation to work past the retirement age (Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2016), and
job crafting is negatively related to leaving intentions among trainee surgeons (Dominguez et al.,
2018). Besides studies being scarce, we note that the samples used in these previous ones have cer-
tain limitations. Both Esteves and Lopez (2017) and Dominguez et al. (2018) studied health care
workers, who are more prone to experience a sense of calling toward their job (Cardador et al.,
2011), thus possibly buffering the effect of job crafting on turnover intentions. Further, the sample
used by Lichtenthaler and Fischbach (2016) was composed of mainly elderly employees, making it
hard to generalize the results to younger populations. Based on existing research, we expect to repli-
cate the negative relationships between job crafting (i.e., increasing structural resources and increas-
ing challenging demands) and intent to leave on an extensive sample, including people with different
professions and within differentiated age categories.

Hypothesis 1: Increasing structural resources and increasing challenging demands are negatively
associated with intent to leave.

The Mediating Role of Meaningfulness and Work Engagement

Recent literature reviews of meaningfulness at work suggest that some job characteristics relate to task
significance and meaningful work (e.g., Lysova et al., 2019). Furthermore, employees who proactively
craft these characteristics experience greater work meaningfulness (Rosso et al., 2010). These state-
ments are supported by studies indicating a positive association between job enrichment (high levels
of skill variety, autonomy, or feedback) and meaningfulness (Johns et al., 1992; May et al., 2004; Renn
& Vandenberg, 1995). The relationship between job characteristics and meaningfulness at work can be
explained by the self-concept theory (Shamir, 1991), which suggests that humans are not only goal-
oriented but also expressive of self-concepts (first underlying motivational assumption of the theory).
Other underlying assumption of the theory is that people are also motivated to retain and increase their
sense of self-consistency. According to the theory, job is motivating when there is a high level of con-
gruence among a person’s self-concept, the job, and the work context (Duchon & Plowman, 2005).
Theory suggests that individuals interpret workplace activities in ways that allow them to estimate
4 Journal of Career Development XX(X)

whether their need for affirmation of the self is met (Leonard et al., 1999), and when they see their roles
as opportunities to express themselves, they will experience a sense of meaning (Shamir, 1991).
Employees assess the congruence between themselves and the work based on two sources of informa-
tion: task feedback and social feedback (Leonard et al., 1999). According to the self-concept theory (Sha-
mir, 1991), individuals make choices among behavioral alternatives in order to obtain feedback consistent
with the self-concept from these two sources (Leonard et al., 1999). Therefore, it is expected that employ-
ees who craft their jobs in accordance with their interests and needs will receive task feedback (e.g., a
higher level of perceived autonomy and variety) and social feedback (by receiving input from colleagues
and supervisors) that indicate a higher congruence between self-concept and work. Indeed, job crafting has
been regarded as a way of redefining work activities in personal meaningful ways, Wrzesniewski and Dut-
ton (2001) argue that “job crafting changes the meaning of work by changing job tasks or relationships in
ways that allow employees to reframe the purpose of the job and experience the work differently” (p. 186).
By crafting their jobs, employees use information about themselves and their jobs in order to incorporate
elements that they find intrinsically meaningful or enjoyable in their work, thus achieving a closer version
of their ideal job and a greater congruence with the self-concept (Berg et al., 2013; Wrzesniewski et al.,
2010). As expected, job crafting is related to meaningfulness at work (Tims et al., 2016), and increasing
structural resources is positively associated with meaning-making at work (Petrou et al., 2017).
Kahn (1990) and Albrecht (2013) argued that work meaningfulness is one of the possible explana-
tory mechanisms by which job characteristics lead to work engagement. May and colleagues (2004)
found that meaningfulness mediated the effects of job enrichment on engagement. As self-concept the-
ory (Shamir, 1991) predicts, meaningfulness at work is positively associated with employees’ engage-
ment (Fairlie, 2011; May et al., 2004; Soane et al., 2013). Finally, meta-analytical findings indicate a
negative association between engagement and turnover (Halbesleben, 2010). Therefore, based on self-
concept theory (Shamir, 1991), we expect employees who increase their resources and challenges
according to their needs and interests to want to stay longer at the current workplace because they will
perceive jobs as being more meaningful and they will be more engaged.

Hypothesis 2: Work meaningfulness and work engagement mediate the relationship between job
crafting and intent to leave.

Method
Participants and Procedure
Participants in this study included 235 Romanian employees of various professions and different age
ranges. Our sample consisted of 159 (67%) women, 75 (32%) men, and 1 gender nonconforming indi-
vidual aged between 18 and 60 (M ¼ 31; SD ¼ 9.42). Among them, 51 (21.7%) worked in the science
and technology field, 30 (12.76%) in information and communication, 28 (11.91%) in education, 14
(6%) in commerce, 13 (5.53%) in finances, 6 (2.55%) in goods production, 5 (2.12%) in health care,
5 (2.12%) in national defense, and 83 (35.31%) declared they worked in another domain. They were
recruited and completed the measures online, therefore consisting a convenience sample. Participants
were informed about the purposes of the study as well as assured of their responses’ confidentiality. All
participation was voluntary as the subjects were informed they could withdraw from the study at any
time without suffering any consequences. In general, the completing duration of the questionnaire was
between 5 and 8 min. There were no missing data. After collecting our data, we used the Mplus Ver-
sion 7 software (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2012) to test our hypotheses.
Oprea et al. 5

Measures
Job crafting. To assess individuals’ job crafting behaviors, we used the Job Crafting Scale (Oprea &
Ştefan, 2015; Tims et al., 2012). Although this scale covers all four dimensions of job crafting men-
tioned before, we selected only the items referring to increasing challenging job demands (e.g., “When
there’s not much to do at the workplace, I see this as an opportunity to start new projects”) and increas-
ing structural job resources (e.g., “I try to learn new things at my workplace”) for the purpose of this
study. As stated in the Introduction, based on prior research, we concluded that these would be the best
predictors for our model. Ten items were used in total, requiring responses on a 5-point Likert-type
scale. For the Romanian version of the scale, Oprea and Ştefan (2015) reported moderate correlations
between work engagement and both increasing structural resources (r ¼ .41) and increasing challen-
ging demands (r ¼ .53) and between job performance and both job crafting dimensions (r ¼ .49 and r
¼ .55, respectively).

Work engagement. In order to measure the participants’ work engagement, we used the Utrecht Work
Engagement Scale (UWES-9, Schaufeli et al., 2006; Vı̂rgă et al., 2009). This includes three factors,
vigor (e.g., “At my work, I feel bursting with energy”), dedication (e.g., “I find the work that I do full
of meaning and purpose”), and absorption (e.g., “I am immersed in my work”) with 3 items attributed
to each of them that required response on a 7-point Likert-type scale. For the Romanian version of the
scale, Vı̂rgă et al. (2009) reported significant correlations between work engagement and organiza-
tional citizenship behavior (r ¼ .42), counterproductive work behavior (r ¼ .24), positive affect
at work (r ¼ .47), and negative affect at work (r ¼ .26).

Work meaningfulness. For measuring participants’ perception of meaning of work, we used the Work
and Meaning Inventory (Steger et al., 2012). The inventory is composed of three subscales measuring
Positive Meaning (e.g., “I have found a meaningful career”), Meaning-Making through Work (e.g.,
“My work helps me better understand myself”), and Greater Good Motivations (e.g., “The work I
do serves a greater purpose”). All items require responses on a 5-point Likert-type scale. The instru-
ment was translated into Romanian independently by two of the authors, then the translations were
compared to choose the most appropriate version of the items. The developers of the scale (Steger
et al., 2012) reported significant correlations with calling (r ¼ .54), job satisfaction (r ¼ .56), and
intrinsic work motivation (r ¼ .27).

Turnover intentions. In order to measure employee’s turnover intentions, we used 2 items adapted and
translated from Hom and Griffeth (1991) and Jaros (1997) studies, namely “I often think about quitting
this organization” and “I intend to search for a position with another employer within the next year.”
These were also scored on a 5-point Likert-type scale. This 2-item measurement was used by Bentein
et al. (2005), with good psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity. Bentein et al.
(2005) reported significant correlations with affective commitment (r ¼ .34), normative commit-
ment (r ¼ .25), and continuance commitment (r ¼ .27).

Results
Measurement Model
The first step in our analysis was testing the factor structure of the measures. We conducted confirma-
tory factor analysis using Mplus. In our measurement model, 5 items loaded the increasing structural
resources factor, 5 items loaded the increasing challenging demands factor, 10 items loaded the three
components of meaningful work (i.e., 4 loaded positive meaning, 3 loaded meaning-making through
work, and 3 loaded greater good motivation), 3 items loaded each component of work engagement
6 Journal of Career Development XX(X)

Table 1. Means, Standard Deviations, Reliabilities, and Correlations Among Study Variables.

Variables M SD 1 2 3 4 5

1. Increasing structural job resources 4.38 0.48 (.65)

2. Increasing challenging job demands 3.75 0.80 .54*** (.80)
3. Meaningful work 3.79 0.80 .50*** .49*** (.90)
4. Work engagement 4.00 1.08 .56*** .59*** .71*** (.92)
5. Intent to leave 2.83 1.44 .29*** .21** .47*** .58*** (.89)
Note. N ¼ 235. Cronbach’s a reliabilities are in parentheses on the diagonal.
**p < .01. ***p < .001.

(i.e., vigor, dedication, absorption), and 2 items loaded the intent to leave factor. Meaningful work and
work engagement were declared as second-order factors, each loaded by their specific components.
After allowing small error correlations within items suggested by the modification indices, the fit
indices for the five factors measurement model (w2 ¼ 760.13, df ¼ 411, w2/df ¼ 1.85, root mean
squared error of approximation [RMSEA] ¼ .06, comparative fit index [CFI] ¼ .92, Tucker–Lewis
Index [TLI] ¼ .91, standardized root mean squared residual [SRMR] ¼ .06) showed a good fit with
the data. This model fitted the data better than any alternative model, for example, the model where
all items loaded on a single-factor model (w2 ¼ 1,498.91, df ¼ 427, w2/df ¼ 3.51, RMSEA ¼ .10, CFI
¼ .75, TLI ¼ .73, SRMR ¼ .08) or the model where items from work engagement and meaningful
work loaded on a single factor (w2 ¼ 1,006.38, df ¼ 421, w2/df ¼ 2.39, RMSEA ¼ .08, CFI ¼ .87, TLI
¼ .85, SRMR ¼ .07). The originally proposed model showed a good fit as CFI and TLI were above .90
(Bentler, 1990), the RMSEA was .06, and the SRMR was lower than .08 (Hu & Bentler, 1999). There-
fore, the measures adopted in our study were valid.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between the Variables

Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations, reliabilities, and zero-order correlations among the vari-
ables included in the study (i.e., increasing structural resources, increasing challenging demands,
meaningful work, work engagement, and intent to leave).

Hypotheses Testing
The mediation hypotheses were tested with bootstrapping procedures using Mplus. Standardized direct
and indirect effects were computed for 5,000 bootstrapped samples. The hypothesized model included
direct effects from increasing structural job resources and increasing challenging job demands to
meaningful work. We have declared a path from meaningful work to work engagement and direct
paths from job crafting components to work engagement. Finally, our model included an effect from
work engagement to intent to leave and direct effects from job crafting components and meaningful
work to intent to leave. The total effect from increasing structural resources to intent to leave was not
significant (b ¼ .21, p > .05) as well as the direct effect (b ¼ .11, p > .05). However, significant
indirect effects can occur in the absence of significant total or direct effects (Rucker et al., 2011). The
indirect effect was significant (b ¼ .32, p < .01). The relation between increasing structural resources
and intent to leave, serially mediated by meaningful work and work engagement, was the only signif-
icant specific indirect effect (b ¼ .23, p < .01) as predicted by our hypothesis. Regarding seeking
challenging demands, the total effect was not significant (b ¼ .21, p > .05), but we found significant
relationships for the indirect effect (b ¼ .44, p < .001) and the direct effect (b ¼ .32, p < .01). Two
specific indirect effects were significant, the one from seeking challenges to intent to leave, through
work engagement (b ¼ .23, p < .05) and the one that was serially mediated by meaningful work and
 ISJR1

Vigor
Dedication
Absorption
ISJR2
Increasing
ISJR3 structural job
resources
ISJR4

ISJR5 .39*** ITL1

.61*** -.97***
Meaningful Work Intent to
work engagement leave
ICJD1 .34** ITL2
ICJD2
Increasing
ICJD3 challenging
job demands
ICJD4

ICJD5

Positive
meaning
motivations
Greater good

through work
Meaning-making
Figure 1. Standardized estimates for the relationships between job crafting, meaningful work, work engagement, and intent to
leave.**p < .01 and ***p < .001.

7
8 Journal of Career Development XX(X)

work engagement (b ¼ .20, p < .01). The model, represented in Figure 1, showed a good fit to the
data (w2 ¼ 734.20, df ¼ 409, w2/df ¼ 1.85, RMSEA ¼ .06, CFI ¼ .93, TLI ¼ .92, SRMR ¼ .06) sup-
porting our hypotheses.
Based on the recommendations of Kelloway (2015), we tested alternative models in order to compare
them with the hypothesized model. The first alternative method included paths from intent to leave to job
crafting components, from job crafting components to meaningful work, and from meaningful work-to-
work engagement. The fit with the data for this model was weaker than that of the original model (w2 ¼
801.93, df ¼ 410, w2/df ¼ 1.96, RMSEA ¼ .06, CFI ¼ .91, TLI ¼ .90, SRMR ¼ .10). The second model
included paths from work engagement to job crafting components, from job crafting to meaningful work,
and from meaningful work to intent to leave. The fit with the data for this model was also weaker com-
pared with the original model (w2 ¼ 754.21, df ¼ 410, w2/df ¼ 1.84, RMSEA ¼ .06, CFI ¼ .92, TLI ¼
.91, SRMR ¼ .06). Therefore, the originally proposed model had the best fit with the data. The standar-
dized values for structural path estimates of the model are presented in Figure 1.

Discussion and Conclusions

This study investigated the relationship between two types of job crafting behaviors (i.e., increasing
structural resources and challenging demands) and employees’ intention to leave their organization.
The mediating roles of work meaningfulness and engagement were also tested. Our findings were
in line with the hypotheses, indicating that work meaningfulness and work engagement serially med-
iate the relationship between job crafting and turnover intentions. Our results support the assumptions
of the self-concept theory (Shamir, 1991). As expected, employees who craft their jobs according to
their interests and motivation perceive their jobs as being more meaningful. These findings indicate
that employees are not only goal-oriented but also expressive of self-concepts. They assess the con-
gruence between self-concept and job by getting information from tasks and social environment (Leo-
nard et al., 1999). When employees perceive their work activities as opportunities to express
themselves, they will experience a sense of meaning, and, as the theory predicts (Shamir, 1991), they
will be more engaged and want to stay in the current job for a longer period of time. Our results are in
line with those of Dominguez et al. (2018), Esteves and Lopes (2017), and Lichtenthaler and Fischbach
(2016) in regard to the negative association between job crafting and turnover intentions. Bakker et al.
(2003) also found that job resources resulted from job crafting are predictors of commitment, which is
in turn negatively related to turnover. Also, our results are in line with other studies regarding the pos-
itive association between job crafting, meaningfulness, and turnover (Sun et al., 2019; Tims et al.,
2013; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

Theoretical Implications
Bottom-up job design and work meaningfulness are often ignored as relevant predictors for intent to
leave (Rubenstein et al., 2018), but our findings highlight the need to integrate these variables into the
theoretical models from turnover literature. Classical models, such as job embeddedness theory
(Mitchell et al., 2001), consider only the strength of the links between employees and institution, col-
leagues, or community. Attitudinal approaches regarding organizational commitment and job satisfac-
tion (Griffeth et al., 2000) focus only on employees’ perceptions of work environment, supervision,
coworkers, or pay. The closest perspectives to our findings are person–organization fit (Hoffman &
Woehr, 2006) and person–job fit (Carless, 2005). These models refer to the match between individual
characteristics and organizational characteristics or to the match between employees’ competencies/
needs and jobs’ demands/benefits. However, our results indicate that employees can proactively influ-
ence the extent to which the work activity matches their own interests and motivations. Therefore, the
Oprea et al. 9

established models in turnover literature could better explain the departures from organizations by tak-
ing into account bottom-up job design.
Self-concept has been used in career development literature by Gottfredson’s (2002) theory of self-
creation, circumscription, and compromise. The theory argues that individuals go through three stages
in their careers: self-creation (developing a self-concept based on abilities, personality, gender, etc.),
circumscription (eliminating occupation alternatives that do not fit the self-concept), and compromise
(giving up alternatives that fit their self-concept, but which are not accessible). Another theory that
uses self-concept as a central construct is Super’s career construction theory (for a review, see
Savickas, 2002). From this perspective, self-concept is a set of self-perceived characteristics that indi-
viduals consider relevant to work roles. Both theories underline the importance of the congruence
between the self-concept and the occupation chosen by the individual. Our findings could provide a
new direction for the development of the two theories, emphasizing not only choosing an occupation
congruent with the self-concept but also the proactive behaviors by which employees can craft their
current job to fit with the way they perceive themselves.

Practical Implications
Interventions aimed at improving employee retention focus on many aspects such as job enrichment,
realistic job previews (McEvoy & Cascio, 1985), preemployment screening (Kettlitz et al., 1997), and
job design (Teresi et al., 1993). Our results suggest that implementing job crafting interventions could
reduce employees’ intentions to leave the organization. Unfortunately, the existing studies regarding
job crafting–based interventions do not measure employees’ intention to quit as an outcome (Oprea
et al., 2019). Future studies could verify whether these interventions may represent a new human
resource management practice to effectively control turnover. More than involving employees in job
crafting interventions as a solution to staff retention difficulties, organization can invest in training pro-
grams that teach managers leadership styles associated with followers’ job crafting behaviors. For
example, existing research identified positive relationships between transformational (Wang et al.,
2017), empowering (Thun & Bakker, 2018), and servant (Harju et al., 2018) leadership and followers’
job crafting. Teaching managers to adopt these leadership styles may have the potential to reduce
employee departures because they stimulate them to craft their jobs. Our results should also be con-
sidered by career counselors. In order to address career development concerns, counselors may stimu-
late job crafting behaviors (i.e., increasing resources and challenging demands according to
preferences based on self-concept), instead of directing employees’ attention to possible future voca-
tional alternatives (Esteves & Lopes, 2017). This approach can lead to the matching of vocational
interests with the current job.

Limitations and Future Directions

Despite this study’s contributions, certain limitations are also worth mentioning. First, the study was
cross-sectional; therefore, the results do not allow us to assume causality between job crafting and
turnover intentions because reverse relationships are possible. It is recommended that future studies
adopt a more rigorous design based on multiple measurements over time. Second, variables were mea-
sured through self-report questionnaires. Thus, future studies may consider measurements other than
self-reports in order to avoid the risk for common method bias (Tehseen et al., 2017). Third, we did not
measure the actual turnover rates, but instead, we focused solely on employees’ intention to quit.
Future studies could also opt for measuring actual turnover rates, as they offer a more accurate view
of how job crafting actually contributes to employee retention. Fourth, the cognitive crafting dimen-
sion mentioned by Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) was not measured in our study. This is due to
adopting the JD-R framework (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) in understanding workplace situations,
10 Journal of Career Development XX(X)

which does not include this prior component. It is possible that changing the way one thinks about their
job could have some effects on their leaving intentions, so future studies could address the role cog-
nitive crafting might have in employees’ turnover intention. Last, further studies could undergo certain
financial analyses to identify the economic value of job crafting–based interventions in relation with
turnover-associated costs. Utility analyzes were used only to estimate the financial benefits of job
crafting interventions for the increase of employee performance in the health care sector (Oprea
et al., 2019). By carrying out utility analyzes regarding the savings from personnel retention as a result
of job crafting interventions, managers and human resource departments would be offered a clearer
view of their future monetary benefits after implementing such interventions and become more prone
to take action toward adopting bottom-up job design approaches (Macan & Foster, 2004).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Bogdan Oprea https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8926-2853

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Author Biographies
Bogdan Oprea is a teaching assistant at University of Bucharest, Romania, and a member of International Affairs
Committee (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology). His research interests focus on job crafting,
leadership, and utility analysis. More specifically, he is interested in how leaders influence followers’ proactive
behaviors and bottom-up job redesign. Moreover, he is interested in estimating the financial value of leaders’
behaviors and followers’ proactivity in the workplace. His work has been published in European Journal of Work
and Organizational Psychology and Career Development International. During his free time, he listens to music
and has fantasies of being a rap star.
Lucian Păduraru acquired his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
(Bucharest University) in 2019 and is currently studying occupational health psychology and human resource per-
formance within a master’s program at the same faculty. Current research and research interests include perceived
work meaningfulness, ways of reducing turnover, and increasing performance. He has participated and presented
his work at various local conferences of industrial–organizational psychology. During his leisure time, he enjoys
riding his bike on sunny days and further cultivation of his understanding of the world.

Dragoş Iliescu is a professor of psychology with the University of Bucharest. His research interests group around
two domains. First, he is interested in applications of psychometrics: psychological and educational assessment,
tests, and testing; he is especially involved in comparative international educational assessments and takes a keen
interest in the cross-cultural components of assessment. Second, he continues research in applied psychology,
especially work, industrial, and organizational psychology, with an important focus on occupational health and
well-being. In his free time, he is a dedicated father and enjoys playing music with his sons.