Building Organizational Commitment through Cognitive and Relational Job Crafting

The objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of job crafting amongst knowledge workers on organizational commitment. While there has been much interest on job crafting in recent years, there has been little focus on how different types of job crafting impact on organizational commitment, and on job crafting in knowledge intensive contexts. To address this aim, we conducted a longitudinal qualitative case study in a software solutions development firm in Denmark. Findings from the study suggest that relational and cognitive job crafting in particular encourage greater affective, normative, and continuous commitment, which may ultimately have a positive influence on talent retention. However, it was also discovered that there is considerable overlap between the types of job crafting, with task job crafting appearing to be a precursor of relational and cognitive job crafting. The paper contributes to further development of the literature by demonstrating a link between job crafting and organizational commitment in a knowledge intensive context, and to managerial practice by offering a strategy in which organizations can encourage greater organizational commitment by providing knowledge workers opportunities to craft their jobs.