Jane Dutton, Amy Wrzesniewski explain job crafting in Harvard Business Review

March 23, 2020


Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) core faculty member Jane Dutton and faculty affiliate Amy Wrzesniewski examine how employees can make their work more engaging and meaningful in the Harvard Business Review article “What Job Crafting Looks Like.”

Drawing on 20 years of research, the women write that they’ve observed three main forms of job crafting—task crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting—and share examples to illustrate what each looks like in real-world scenarios.

“The principles of job crafting remain deeply relevant in a world where job structure is rapidly changing, putting more and more responsibility on the individual for the experience and engagement in their work,” Dutton and Wrzesniewski write. “While this certainly creates challenges, it also brings opportunities to build the kinds of task, relational, and cognitive landscapes that bring meaning to work.”

Dutton is a CPO co-founder and the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Wrzesniewski is a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management at Yale University.