Information technology and crafting of job: Shaping future of work?

Advance of information technologies is changing the nature of work and transforming traditional jobs. Routine repetitive tasks are delegated to machines while tasks performed by and jobs held by humans are turning into knowledge-based ones. In knowledge-based work compared to industrialized ones, job crafting at the individual level seems to become a norm rather than exception. Contrary to the traditional top down job design popularly done and imposed by management in industrialized work context based on time and motion analyses, job crafting is a bottom up redesign of job by individual workers for their own job. In knowledge based works, job crafting would be critical in achieving individual performance as job requirements are not predetermined but determined along the way by the workers in order to produce creative outcomes. In this regard, job crafting behavior of individual worker is deemed to be dependent up the job characteristics such as complexity of the job and autonomy given to workers while characteristics of technology in use, especially compatibility and actual usage, may also shape the job crafting behavior of individual workers. In this study, influence of individual characteristics (proactivity and self-efficacy), job characteristics (complexity and autonomy), and technology related characteristics in the work context (compatibility and use) were identified as critical antecedents of job crafting and empirically tested using survey data collected from the field. Data largely confirms the proposed research model, confirming that individual job performance is strongly dependent upon job crafting while two groups of antecedents - characteristics of job and technology - are strong predictors of individual job crafting. Impact of job characteristics seem to be statistically strong while strongest is the compatibility of technology with work in hand. Interestingly, it is found that simple use of technology alone would not statistically explain job crafting at all. It is implied here that job crafting would become important in knowledge based society, and this individual need of job crafting should be taken into consideration in designing technologies. Longitudinal in-depth studies are needed to find out elaborate processes of individual job crafting.