The Theory of Planned Behaviour as a Frame for Job Crafting: Explaining and Enhancing Proactive Adjustment at Work

Rapid changes in the work environment require employees to proactivity shape their job characteristics to sustain motivation, energy, and performance. Traditionally, job redesign was mainly a top-down process, where the management of an organisation was in charge of defining the most appropriate job description of a mansion. Today, such an approach does not respond anymore to the challenges of the work environment, and awareness has developed among scholars and practitioners about the importance of empowering individuals to let them adjust their job characteristics to reach organisation goals, i.e. through job crafting interventions. In this theoretical contribution, we propose the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) as a framework to design positive psychology interventions aiming to enhance adaptive job crafting behaviours. We argue that the TPB provides a solid foundation to explicate the mechanisms by which job crafting positive interventions are expected to exert their effects on behaviour. Such an approach allows targeting the content and the tools of the interventions based on participants’ needs, effectively addressing the causal determinants of behaviour and behaviour change in multicultural organisational contexts.