Sustainable work through crafting

Recent decades have seen growing interest in research into how employees can, on their own initiative, develop their jobs to make them better suited to themselves. Such employee-initiated job design activities are referred to in the literature as job crafting. Research on job-crafting research has progressed in leaps and bounds, and the concept of crafting has grown to include the balance and boundaries between work and nonwork life domains, as well as employees’ off-job time. This chapter describes recent theoretical and conceptual advances in crafting research. Specifically, we focus on the integrative needs model of crafting and use this to describe how new crafting concepts - i.e. work-nonwork life balance involving life domain boundaries and off-job time - are increasingly important for creating sustainable employment and a good work-life balance in modern working life. We also make recommendations for future research on crafting and propose guidelines on how to support crafting.