Abstract
In their day-to-day work, employees navigate various opportunities and challenges while striving to achieve key outcomes. Job crafting provides a mechanism for this, enabling employees to modify their roles, whether the tasks, relational boundaries or cognitive aspects, to better align with their interests, goals and preferences, thereby facilitating the achievement of work outcomes. A key enabler of these job crafting behaviours is an individual’s confidence in their ability to enact such changes, a concept termed job crafting efficacy. This study aimed to develop and validate a job crafting efficacy scale and explore its relationship with work role performance.
A mixed methods, exploratory sequential design was employed. The qualitative phase involved semi-structured interviews among a purposive sample of 16 employees selected from a global financial services organisation in South Africa. Thematic analysis of the data identified five primary themes: (1) understanding job crafting and job crafting efficacy, (2) confidence shaped by knowledge and role boundaries, (3) outcomes of job crafting, (4) influence of job crafting efficacy, and (5) barriers and resources of job crafting, with 11 subthemes. These findings informed the development of the 27-item job crafting efficacy questionnaire, which was refined by expert review in a pilot study. In the quantitative phase, the questionnaire was distributed and yielded 420 responses, through a convenience sample. Data were analysed using SPSS and JASP, which involved conducting exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using a diagonally weighted least squares estimator, reliability analysis, and structural equation modelling (SEM).
The EFA yielded a robust 20-item scale with a four-factor solution structure: (1) Social Support Efficacy, (2) Proactive Relational Crafting Efficacy, (3) Agentic Task Crafting Efficacy, and (4) Task Crafting Efficacy. CFA confirmed the factor structure as demonstrating excellent fit for both the first-order model with four correlated factors and a more parsimonious second-order model in which the four first-order factors loaded onto a single general Job Crafting Efficacy factor. The Job Crafting Efficacy Scale and its subscales demonstrated excellent internal consistency (McDonald’s ω = .943 for the total scale)...