2019 Annual Conference

Adult Development

Roundtable (45 minutes)

This session engages participants in a discussion of six case studies from a qualitative study on school leadership to examine the relationship between job crafting and meaningful work. This session also engages in the literature of meaningful work, organizational culture and employee engagement as they relate to job crafting.

Participants would be individuals who engage professionally in their organization in adult learning and development, talent development, coaching, or understanding or assessing performance of individuals within an organization. 

Focus session participants will first engage in a discussion of case studies in which leaders describe their jobs within their organizations to examine the characteristics of job crafting within a specific context. As a result, participants will be able to answer the following within the context of her own organization: (1) Why does job crafting occur? (2) How can job crafting relate to meaningful work? (3) How are proactivity and adaptivity expressions of job crafting? (4) How might job crafting differ by level, or rank, of an employee? (5) How might job crafting make work meaningful at the organizational level?

Job-crafting can be described as the ability to change cognitive, task, or relational boundaries to tailor one’s own job within an organization (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). This interactive focus session is constructed in five parts, fluidly transitioning one into another:

• Job-Crafting Case Studies - establishes the importance of this within the context of an organization to meaningful work
• Expressions of Job-Crafting - examines specific instances of job crafting within the context of schools to understand the impact of job crafting on an organization
• Meaning and Identity through Job-Crafting - establishes the individual identity as it relates to the work environment and the importance of this meaning-making to the individual and the organization
• Engagement through Job-Crafting - presents the concept of fostering job crafting formally in individuals as an innovative approach to employee development and coaching
• Organizational Impacts through Job-Crafting - engages in discourse about the impact of individual job-crafting to create meaningful and innovative workplaces

At the beginning of each part of the session, participants will be given two essential questions to stimulate initial discussion.  Participants will then be presented with case studies and current key research related to job-crafting and asked to consider those two essential questions further, to consider broader implications of the research and to transition the discussion to the next part of the session.

To move towards application and closure, participants will revisit three specific statements drawn from the earlier case studies and examine what those statements may be indicating about job-crafting. In closing, participants will be provided with a list of all of the essential questions provided in the focus presentation and consider which are the most relevant research questions and why.