Crafting when teleworking: A daily diary study on the combinations of job and home crafting and their relationship with energy depletion

Abstract

Scholars made clear that daily job and home crafting can optimize employees' well-being, also when teleworking. Since telework is largely characterized by a constant juggle between work and home roles, we need knowledge on how teleworkers can combine job and home crafting during the day. While previous studies have almost exclusively applied an enrichment-based perspective, which assumes that daily job and home crafting can be combined unlimitedly, the current study proposes an effort-based perspective, which assumes that crafting requires effort and, therefore, can only be done within certain limits. Using a daily diary study (N = 839 days nested within 202 full-time teleworkers), we investigate whether daily approach job and home crafting can prevent daily energy depletion. Moreover, we predict that equally allocating efforts across daily approach job and home crafting is related to the lowest levels of energy depletion. Multilevel polynomial regression analyses showed that daily approach job and home crafting were negatively related to daily energy depletion. As an important exception to this general finding, the combination of high approach job and home crafting was related to higher energy depletion and should be avoided. Finally, our results indicated that, in general, allocating efforts to approach job crafting is more useful than allocating efforts to approach home crafting.