The Emergence of Inter-Organizational Working Through the Processes of Job Crafting: A Relational Perspective

Organizations are becoming are increasingly reliant on employee-initiative to deal with interdependence and unpredictability in work contexts (Grant & Parker, 2009; Griffin, Neal & Parker, 2007). One form of employee-initiative is job crafting - an informal, personalized and continuous process through which employees alter their own job and their work environment (Berg, Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2010; Oldham & Hackman, 2010; Grant & Parker, 2009; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Job crafting is a useful perspective to examine how employees initiate inter-organizational working because it relaxes the assumptions of top-down work design - by moving away from ostensive requirements of the job into the realm of highly motivated self-initiated informal elements. However, although scholars acknowledge that employees change the design of work by crafting the relational and task boundaries of their job, how this plays out has received little attention (Parker, 2014; Grant & Parker, 2009). As a result, we know little of how the processes of job crafting inform inter-organizational working.