Anja Isabel Morstatt’s research while affiliated with Technische Universität Braunschweig and other places

We examined the association between changes in employee job and off-job crafting and their self-rated health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we investigated how these associations differed across sample subgroups, contrasting differences in work location, living situation, and contractual changes (short-time work). We used four waves of a longitudinal dataset surveying NTotal = 783 German-speaking employees from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria from 2019 to 2021. We applied latent change score modeling and multigroup analyses to investigate our research questions. Results indicated that the mean job and off-job crafting and self-rated health trajectories remained relatively stable. However, we observed significant interindividual variance in job and off-job crafting changes. We found a consistent small positive relationship between crafting changes in both life domains over time, indicating that employees tended to change their crafting efforts similarly across domains. Additionally, job crafting increases between Waves 1 and 2 were linked to higher subsequent self-rated health at Wave 2, and similarly, off-job crafting increases between Waves 3 and 4 were linked to higher self-rated health at Wave 4. We observed only minor differences in this pattern across subgroups. Our results show how adaptive changes in crafting are linked to broader interindividual health differences and help identify groups who are not able to increase crafting during crises and thus could benefit from targeted support. Crafting can be an effective individual strategy for maintaining health, complementing organizational and public health measures. We encourage future research to incorporate temporal and contextual phenomena into crafting research.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the boundaries between the work and nonwork domain have rapidly blurred, presenting employees with new challenges and potentially heightening interference of the work with the nonwork domain (work-home interference, WHI) and vice versa (home-work interference, HWI). To counteract these interferences, employees can apply work-nonwork balance crafting (WNBC), referring to proactive efforts for balancing both life domains by targeting the permeability of the boundary between them. Employees may focus their crafting on the boundary toward the work domain (WNBC-work) or the non-work domain (WNBC-nonwork), e.g., shielding each domain from negative spillover from the other. This study aims to investigate the longitudinal associations of WNBC with health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesized that individuals who exhibited more such crafting behaviors at the onset of the pandemic would experience higher mental well-being and work engagement at later points in the COVID-19 pandemic, mediated by lower WHI and HWI. We surveyed N = 2,171 German-speaking employees from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at three time points during 2020. Structural equation model results indicate that only WNBC-work is longitudinally negatively associated with reduced HWI and positively associated with mental well-being and work engagement. Further, in our sample, only HWI is longitudinally associated with lower mental well-being. No indirect effect reaches significance. Our results underline the importance of WNBC in the work domain in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research should explore the nature of the direct links between WNBC and mental well-being and work engagement and consider alternative mediating processes, such as gain spirals. Lastly, our study underscores that supporting employees in crafting boundaries for well-being can be crucial, particularly during times of crisis.

Crafting research has often focused solely on the work domain or examined work and non‐work life domains separately, using a variable‐centered approach. Little is known about the interactions of crafting processes in the work and non‐work domain. In this time‐lagged study, we examined (1) the relationship between job and off‐job crafting behaviours using a person‐centered approach to identify crafting profiles, (2) whether job, home and personal resources differentially predicted these profiles and (3) whether these profiles differed in relation to outcomes, that is work engagement and mental well‐being. We conducted a three‐wave, time‐lagged survey with 3‐month intervals among 2125 employees. The results revealed three profiles of active (18.0%), average (48.2%) and least active (33.9%) crafters. Analyses of predictors showed that active crafters had higher levels of home developmental possibilities and self‐efficacy than average and least active crafters, likewise for average crafters compared with least active crafters. Furthermore, active crafters had higher levels of social support at home than least active crafters. Regarding well‐being outcomes, active crafters experienced significantly higher mental well‐being than average and least active crafters and higher work engagement than least active crafters. Interventions to enhance employee's resources could stimulate crafting behaviours, ultimately improving well‐being.