Development and Validation of a Short Broad Job Crafting Scale

Abstract

The dominant perspectives in the job crafting literature have different views on “what elements of their job employees craft” and “why employees craft their jobs”. To better grasp both perspectives, we developed and validated a short 4-item instrument (BJCS) to capture job crafting as the self-initiated changes made to one’s job with the intention to optimize one’s functioning. We validated the BJCS through five phases: (1) we developed the BJCS and conducted a qualitative study to establish content validity, (2) we establish its reliability and psychometric properties, (3) we demonstrated discriminant and convergent validity of the BJCS in relation to existing job crafting measures, and (4 & 5) the BJCS showed to be predictive and incrementally valid over and above existing measures in relation to indicators of optimal and dysfunctional functioning. Taken together, we demonstrated the validity of a broad short measure for job crafting which is especially relevant for the use in repeated measurement research.