Leading by Leaving: Exploring the Relationship Between Supervisory Control and Job Crafting

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether different supervisory styles are relevant in facilitating or inhibiting job crafting, and whether job crafting has a significant role in promoting self-competence and work performance. Data were gathered from 162 employees in a large manufacturing company and analyzed through a regression methodology. Our theoretical approach to job crafting is based on the job demands-resource model. We found a positive relationship between promotive control and job crafting behaviors such as increasing structural and social resources, and increasing challenging demands, and a negative relationship between restrictive control and job crafting behaviors such as increasing structural resources and increasing challenging demands. Job crafting behaviors such as increasing structural resources and challenging demands positively affect both self-competence and performance, while decreasing hindering demands negatively affects self- competence and performance. Our results have significant implications for organizations interested in facilitating job crafting and increasing employees’ self-competence and performance, as they should encourage a promotive style of managerial control and avoid a restrictive style of control, which we found to be deleterious for job crafting, self-competence and performance.