Job Crafting in Nursing: Mediation between Work Engagement and Job Performance in a Multisample Study

Job crafting is considered a specific form of proactive behavior whereby workers actively change the actual or perceived characteristics of their jobs in order to better match the demands placed on them and the resources available. As nursing could be considered a stressful profession, job crafting is proposed as a mediator between nurses’ work engagement and job performance. Hence, the main objective of this study was to provide empirical evidence on job crafting in nursing, including the three most prominent conceptualizations of the construct. The present research covers three independent empirical studies of registered or practical nurses of Spanish public and private hospitals: Study 1 (N = 699), Study 2 (N = 498), and Study 3 (N = 308). (3) Our results support the hypothesis that nurses’ job engagement and job-crafting behaviors can affect their job performance. Our finding corroborates that engaged nurses can act to proactively change their jobs, but comparing different job-crafting conceptualizations and measures, the current findings support that effectiveness of diverse job crafting behaviors could vary. To sum up, as the JDR approach proposed, the present study supports the position that work engagement influences job performance, as well as the mediating role of job crafting in this relationship. The current study takes this knowledge one step further by revealing that not all types of job-crafting behaviors are equally efficient and not all types are adequate for specific working environments, such as nursing.