Drawing on COR theory [
9,
10,
15], the present study examined the mediating effect of daily ego depletion in the relationship between daily job crafting and internal recovery state (vigor and low fatigue at the end of day), and the moderating effect of self-control demands at work, using a daily diary method. Our results showed that daily ego depletion mediated the effect of daily job crafting on employee vigor and fatigue at the end of day. Moreover, self-control demands at work affected these indirect effects. Specifically, the indirect effect was stronger for employees with high self-control demands at work than employees with low self-control demands at work. This study demonstrates that positive work behavior (job crafting) is an important means of attaining internal recovery from work.
Contributions to the literature
Our findings contribute to research on recovery from work and to research on job crafting in several ways. First, we extend research on recovery from work by testing how to promote internal recovery. This issue is important because employees spend a third to a half of their day at the workplace and they have little time to participate in recovery activities during non-work time. Furthermore, organizations have a greater opportunity to influence employees’ internal recovery than external recovery [
49].
However, most research has focused on how to promote external recovery [
50], paying little attention to the question of how to enhance employees’ internal recovery state. The small number of studies on promoting internal recovery have found that it is associated with work pleasure [
51,
52] and work engagement [
6]. Our study contributes to this small body of research by examining the positive effect of daily job crafting on employees’ daily internal recovery state. The findings showed that daily job crafting positively predicts employee end-of-day vigor, and negatively predicts employee end-of-day fatigue. Thus, we are among the first researchers to address work-related factors affecting employees’ internal recovery state, instead of off-job factors influencing external recovery. Our findings highlight the value of COR theory as a conceptual framework for studying the benefits of job crafting for daily internal recovery.
Second, our study provides support for the resource perspective on how job crafting might promote employees’ internal recovery state. In line with COR, our findings suggest that daily job crafting can reduce resource depletion by increasing social and structural resources and by decreasing hindering job demands. With lower ego depletion, employees will go on to possess even more resources and lose fewer resources [
9]; thus, they will have more resources at the end of the workday and experience more vigor and less fatigue. Our findings extend prior work by using a resource perspective to conceptualize the relationship between job crafting and internal recovery from work.
The finding that job crafting negatively predicts employees’ ego depletion is consistent with previous findings showing that job resources and job demands are related to employees’ ego depletion [
53]. Further, our finding suggests that the changes that employees make to balance their job demands and job resources with their personal abilities and needs (job crafting) can relieve employees’ ego depletion. This study thus complements and expands the prior literature on the effect of resource loss on recovery [
54], by examining the relationship between ego depletion and internal recovery state. The results showed that daily ego depletion is negatively related to end-of-day vigor and positively related to end-of-day fatigue.
Third, the present study contributes to our understanding of whether job crafting is more beneficial in some circumstances than others. Our study was the first to test the moderator of self-control demands at work in the relationship between job crafting and internal recovery state. We found that the circumstance of high demands for self-control at work increased the association between job crafting and recovery. That is, self-control demands moderated this association. Previous studies mainly focused on the moderating role of leadership styles (i.e., servant leadership) [
55], personality traits (i.e., optimism) [
56] and job resources (i.e., perceived organizational support) [
57] in the relationship between job crafting and work-related outcomes. The present study extends the line by testing the boundary role of job demands (self-control demands).
Individuals are inclined to preserve their daily resource levels in order to prevent complete loss of resources [
58]. Job crafting could help employees achieve this by increasing job resources and decreasing job demands. As predicted, employees with high self-control demands are motivated to search for job resources and to decrease job demands (that is, to do job crafting). Consistent with the gain paradox principle of COR theory [
15], this finding suggests that employees with high self-control demands have fewer resources and are more likely to benefit from job crafting as a way to reduce the risk of ego depletion. For this group, job crafting could be especially helpful in preventing fatigue and promoting vigor at the end of work.
Finally, the present study contributes to a broader understanding of the effects of job crafting. Studies on job crafting have primarily focused on its effect on employees’ work-related outcomes, such as increasing job satisfaction [
59], enhancing job performance [
24], and reducing turnover intention [
60]. However, the potential positive effects of job crafting on employee non-work-related outcomes have been largely overlooked. Our study found that people who are able to craft their jobs have a higher recovery state at the end of the workday, helping us gain understanding on the effects of job crafting on employees.
One strength of the present study is the use of a within-person daily diary method. This method can capture dynamic and short-term relationships between job crafting and its outcomes. The daily diary method has been used to document the positive effects of daily job crafting on work-related outcomes such as work engagement [
21], job performance [
61]. Our study found that daily job crafting was negatively related to daily ego depletion and end-of-day fatigue, and positively related to end-of-day vigor. These results provide a more holistic picture of how job crafting might be related to an internal recovery state within a short-term time period, even on a day-to-day basis. Given that employees’ tasks or goals may vary from day to day, the daily diary method is useful in uncovering dynamic adjustments in the actions employees take to recover from work-related stressors.
Practical implications
The results of the current study have several potential practical implications. First, the findings showed how job crafting may offer a new avenue for employees to achieve an internal recovery state. Hence, managers are advised to offer their employees sufficient leeway to determine what tasks are done and how tasks are done. When employees can determine themselves how they do their work, they can choose to modify their work (e.g., increasing job resources or decreasing hindrances) so they can experience more vigor and less fatigue. Previous studies suggested that job crafting interventions are effective in helping employees to adapt their job demands and job resources [
62‐
64], and they can enhance work engagement [
64], improve job performance [
65] and increase job resources [
37]. Thus, we suggest that managers consider encouraging and offering job crafting interventions for employees. Specific intervention steps are described by Van den Heuvel et al. [
30]. These include exercises and goal setting aimed at increasing social job resources, increasing challenging job demands, increasing structural job resources, and decreasing hindering job demands. In training, employees may develop personalized job crafting plans, in which they formulate specific job crafting goals. The findings of our study indicate that these goals may refer to small steps an employee can take to change elements in the work content and context.
Because job crafting is a bottom-up job redesign, organizations need to provide support for employees to craft their jobs. A combination of top-down and bottom-up job redesign seems most likely to yield favorable results for employees and organizations at large. Further, to build resource flexibility for job crafting, organizations should focus on hiring employees who are flexible in their skills and behavior, and who can adapt to new roles or new aspects of their job.
Second, our results showed that ego depletion mediates the relationship between job crafting and internal recovery state. Therefore, in addition to providing job crafting interventions, organizations may provide additional resources to help employees decrease ego depletion, which in turn would boost their internal recovery. One way that organizations could decrease employees’ ego depletion would be by meeting employees’ basic psychological needs at work. For example, given that mindfulness is positively related to basic psychological needs [
66], managers may provide mindfulness interventions to meet employees’ psychological needs. In addition, interventions that can target ego depletion (e.g., cognitive-behavioral training) can also be taken into consideration to decrease the risk of ego depletion [
67]. Managers can implement these intervention programs in the workplace.
Finally, the present diary study confirms that job crafting’s effects of decreasing ego depletion and increasing recovery from work appear to be most beneficial for employees with high self-control demands at work. However, individuals with high self-control demands are likely to ruminate about their work and have difficulty mentally detaching from work [
68]. Thus, it is difficult for employees with high self-control demands to effectively engage in recovery activities such as relaxation. Job crafting may be especially useful for these employees. By contrast, employees with low self-control demands have sufficient resources and need less internal recovery [
39]. This group might benefit more from other avenues of attaining recovery from job demands. For example, they could take micro-breaks at work or a longer lunch break [
69,
70].
Limitations and future research
There are several limitations of the present study that need to be addressed in future research. First, the data were all collected with self-report questionnaires, which may raise concerns about common method variance. However, in our study, some potential person-level sources of common method variance (e.g., self-control demands at work) were controlled using a within-person design. In addition, most of the variables of interest in the present study (e.g., ego depletion, vigor, fatigue) concern individuals’ own feelings, making them difficult to measure without self-report. Nevertheless, it will be beneficial in future studies to collect data from different sources to replicate our findings. For example, employees’ supervisors or colleagues might be able to report employees’ job crafting behavior.
Second, the current study focused on the relationship between job crafting and internal recovery, but did not control for the effects of internal recovery activities (e.g., micro-breaks at work, restive lunch breaks, etc.). Previous studies have suggested that employees who self-initiate micro-breaks at work experience higher vigor and lower fatigue [
71,
72]. Therefore, future research should control for these self-help activities in order to examine the unique effect of job crafting on internal recovery.
Finally, we tested only employees’ self-control demands at work as a moderator of the relationship between job crafting and internal recovery. Previous studies have demonstrated that perceived organizational support also has an important effect on the relationship between job crafting and employees’ attitudes and behavior [
57]. Future research could examine perceived organizational support as a context that could reinforce the association between job crafting and internal recovery.
Finally, consistent with other research [
29], we used an overall composite score to represent job crafting. Although research has suggested that there are different dimensions of job crafting [
21], supplementary analysis showed a similar pattern of results regardless of the type of job crafting that was being assessed. Nevertheless, future researchers could develop hypotheses about these specific domains of job crafting in relation to employee internal recovery.