Introduction: Employees initiating changes to their job demands and resources in the form of job crafting has been widely studied, with meta-analyses linking this behavior to performance and well-being. Recent literature shifts the focus from the crafting individual to the broader social context surrounding this proactive behavior, studying crafting as a collaborative team effort or reactions of coworkers after observing an employee crafting their job. Employing such a social lens, researchers have also investigated whether engagement in job crafting is transmitted from one coworker to another, reporting a positive link between job crafting in employee dyads. Even though these studies have argued that such a transmission occurs because of crossover and/or vicarious learning processes, these underlying processes have not yet been investigated in detail.


Purpose: Focusing on such transmission processes of job crafting between coworker dyads from a motivational perspective, we aim to explore the transmission of job crafting motivation as an underlying mechanism. We draw on the model of proactive motivation, which posits the three motivational states of reason-to, energized-to and can-do as drivers of proactive behaviors. In the context of coworker dyads, we examine whether the energized-to and the can-do motivational states are transmitted between dyads of coworkers in a weekly diary study.


Method: We recruited employees who then invited one coworker to participate together with them. Both dyad members filled out weekly questionnaires across five workweeks. The motivational state of energized-to was operationalized using vigor and the can-do state was assessed using self-efficacy.


Results: Data collection just ended. Preliminary correlational analyses indicate hypothesized relationships between coworkers. Results of multilevel modelling will be presented at the conference.


Conclusions: This study aims to empirically test underlying motivational transmission between colleagues, shedding light onto how job crafters pass their motivation to craft their job on to their close coworkers.