Amy Wrzesniewski

The CNN article How to fix your job so that you love it, in three steps” cites research by Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) co-founder Jane Dutton and faculty affiliate Amy Wrzesniewski.

The article focuses on how workers can improve their day-to-day happiness through a process Dutton and Wrzesniewski call “job crafting.” Job crafting involves refining your job to add parts you like and remove parts you don’t, building better relationships with your colleagues, and reframing your job to add meaning and purpose.

Dutton and Wrzesniewski’s job crafting study focused on a group of hospital cleaning staff. The researchers discovered that those who liked their jobs saw themselves as playing a crucial role in patients’ healing, rather than just performing mundane tasks like emptying bed pans.

“It’s more than just a change of mindset,” Wrzesniewski says. “It’s a change in your behavior approach to your job. If you think ‘I’m an ambassador to the hospital,’ it changes what you do.”

Dutton is 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 Yale University.

Info Session for Faculty on Virtual Teaching of Job Crafting: How to Integrate the Job Crafting Exercise™ into Your Virtual Classroom

Job crafting — or the ways we can customize our work to better suit our strengths, values, and passions — has become more important than ever. The global pandemic has disrupted the landscape of where and how people work and has prompted people to reconsider their sense of purpose and options for working in general. Powerful movements towards greater social justice have reinforced the need to create inclusive workspaces where people can personalize and feel embraced in their work environments.

As educators, we have the opportunity to integrate job crafting into our classrooms to help support and empower our students during this critical time. Additionally, the shift to virtual classrooms has prompted many of us to reconsider how we are constructing our course materials and optimizing online education methods for our students.

Since its creation at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 2008, the Job Crafting™ Exercise (JCE) has been used in hundreds of university programs worldwide, including at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels.

Join the co-creators of the JCE (Justin Berg, Jane Dutton, and Amy Wrzesniewski) for a panel discussion facilitated by Meredith Myers, Job Crafting LLC Executive Director.

Topics include:

• Why job crafting is especially important in these times
• Fundamentals of the JCE itself
• A brief review of the JCE Teaching Note and ways to customize
• Various options for integrating the JCE into online learning environments
• An overview of how to use the online version of the JCE (launched in 2019) vs. the hard copy
• Time to field questions from faculty attendees

Click here to view recording of info session

Questions?

Please email help@jobcrafting.com

Positive Voices spotlights the value of applying positive psychology during hard times in “Episode 3: Coping with Covid with Larry King and Dr. Jane Dutton.”

Dutton, a Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) core faculty member, lays out a simple framework to help people be engaged, resilient and healthier at home and work. She tells King and co-host James Pawelski that the key is to cultivate positive connections, positive emotions and positive meaning.

The episode also examines the role of compassion in supporting laid-off workers and leading effectively, Dutton’s job crafting research with CPO faculty affiliate Amy Wrzesniewski, and the importance of first impressions.

“Sometimes people think of positive psychology as a way of cheering people up or a way of not focusing on things that aren’t pleasant,” Pawelski says. “But, what I hear you saying, Jane, is that positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship doesn’t shy away from the truth, from the reality that people find themselves in. But, rather, it leans into that reality and it finds ways of establishing, re-establishing those human connections, understanding that there’s something vitally important in how we connect with each other.”

Dutton is a CPO core faculty member and the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan.

The Harvard Business Review article “If You’re Burning Out, Carve a New Path” cites research on job crafting by Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) co-founder Jane Dutton and faculty affiliate Amy Wrzesniewski.

The article notes that monotony, lack of flow and lack of autonomy can negatively impact mental health and lead to stress and burnout in the workplace. It suggests that job crafting—letting employees customize their roles to make work more meaningful—may be the solution.

Dutton and Wrzesniewski pioneered the concept of job crafting in 2001 and have continued to explore its impacts. The HBR article cites a paper the women co-authored about a study of cleaners at a prestigious university hospital. The cleaners were broken into two groups, those who enjoyed their jobs and those who didn’t. The cleaning staff who enjoyed their jobs were found to incorporate empathy into their work.

“In one scenario, Wrzesniewksi describes how cleaning staff would put themselves in the physical place of a patient by looking up towards the ceiling ‘to see if there were things that were up there that we might not notice, but would bother the patients if they had to look at them all day long.’ ” Harvard Business Review reports.

The article indicates that such behaviors might have an added bonus beyond making work more meaningful for employees: It also might increase productivity, engagement and retention for employers.

The article is part of an ongoing Harvard Business Review series on job crafting.

Dutton is a CPO core faculty member 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.

The Harvard Business Review article “Craft a Career That Reflects Your Character” cites research by Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) co-founder Jane Dutton and faculty affiliate Amy Wrzesniewski.

The article encourages workers to harness the types of job crafting that Dutton and Wrzesniewski have identified in their research—cognitive, task and relational—to not just make work more meaningful and satisfying, but also to transform it into a crucible for self-improvement.

“We propose that through job crafting — by actively reimagining, redefining, and redesigning your own job — your workplace can become a moral laboratory for character development,” morality researchers Isaac H. Smith and Maryam Kouchaki write in the article. “This is particularly important considering the thousands of hours you will likely spend at work, and it all begins by reframing your approach to work as an opportunity to become a better person, in all aspects of your life.”

Dutton is a CPO core faculty member 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.

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.

“Can You Learn To Love Work You Don’t Like? Experts Say It’s Possible” highlights Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski’s research on “job crafting.”

The Forbes article explores how employees can improve workplace satisfaction by redesigning their jobs to better fit their preferences, building better relationships with colleagues, and reframing work to add meaning and purpose. The process, which Dutton and Wrzesniewski pioneered, is known as job crafting.

“In any relationship, love is something we build, not something we stumble upon and expect it to be perfect,” Forbes says. “This is also true when it comes to your job.”

Dutton is a co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) and the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Wrzesniewski, a CPO faculty affiliate, is a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management at Yale University.

Essay examines the phenomenon of successful people who remain unhappy

Jane Dutton

The New York Times Magazine recently published a special issue on “The Future of Work,” and one article causing some buzz — titled “Wealthy, Successful, and Miserable” — highlights research conducted by Michigan Ross Professor Emerita Jane Dutton.

The article, by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Duhigg, explores widespread unhappiness among American workers, particularly those who are most successful on paper. He discusses the importance of finding meaning in your work and highlights research conducted by Dutton, the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Business Administration and Psychology, and her colleague Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale.

Amy Wrzesniewski

The researchers studied why certain janitors at a large hospital showed more engagement than others, finding that they viewed their jobs as a form of caregiving.

“To some, the moral might seem obvious: If you see your job as healing the sick, rather than just swabbing up messes, you’re likely to have a deeper sense of purpose whenever you grab the mop. But what’s remarkable is how few workplaces seem to have internalized this simple lesson,” Duhigg writes.

This article was originally published as a Ross Thought in Action article. 

Job crafting or the idea of redesigning your job to better suit your values, passions, and strengths was offered as a form of late-career change advice in The New York Times article, “When Small Steps Can Change Your Life.” Job crafting is the brainchild of Jane Dutton, Amy Wrzesniewski, and Justin Berg.

Dutton is a co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations and the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan. Wrzesniewski is a member of the Center’s Research Advisory Board and a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale University.

In the BBC article, “Stephen Hawking’s advice for fulfilling career,” Amy Wrzesniewski explains how people can use job crafting to help bring meaning and purpose to their work and life. Job crafting, based on research by Wrzesniewski along with Jane Dutton and Justin Berg, is that idea that employees can redesign their own jobs in ways that can foster job satisfaction, engagement, resilience, and thriving at work.

Wrzesniewski is a member of the Center’s Research Advisory Board and a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale University.

Building on an inductive, qualitative study of independent workers—people not affiliated with an organization or established profession—this paper develops a theory about the management of precarious and personalized work identities. We find that in the absence of organizational or professional membership, workers experience stark emotional tensions encompassing both the anxiety and fulfillment of working in precarious and personal conditions. Lacking the holding environment provided by an organization, the workers we studied endeavored to create one for themselves through cultivating connections to routines, places, people, and a broader purpose. These personal holding environments helped them manage the broad range of emotions stirred up by their precarious working lives and focus on producing work that let them define, express, and develop their selves. Thus holding environments transformed workers’ precariousness into a tolerable and even generative predicament. By clarifying the process through which people manage emotions associated with precarious and personalized work identities, and thereby render their work identities viable and their selves vital, this paper advances theorizing on the emotional underpinnings of identity work and the systems psychodynamics of independent work.

Professor Sue Ashford and colleagues studied how people find ways to create the structure and identity that companies used to provide.

As anyone who’s worked in the gig economy knows, it can feel awfully lonely out there.

As the gig economy — where companies pay for specific tasks on a contract basis — grows, the independent workers drawn to its freedom and flexibility are met with challenges distinct from those faced by people who work at companies. Without a company to support and affirm their working identity, it can feel as precarious as their economic situation often does.

New research by Michigan Ross Professor Sue Ashford and her colleagues Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD and Amy Wrzesniewski of the Yale School of Management could help show people how to thrive as independent workers. They carefully interviewed people who have worked this way for years to learn what it’s like and, through their experiences, offer insights on how they created an environment for success.

Their paper, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, answers the question: How do you make a work life work when you have to set it up yourself?

Susan J. Ashford

“There’s a sense of precariousness with independent work and, given their freedom to make whatever they wish in whatever way they wish, the work also feels quite personal,” says Ashford, Michael & Susan Jandernoa Professor of Management and Organizations and chair of management and organizations. “These conditions create the extreme highs and lows that come with being on their own. Without an organization to provide an identity, they often rely on staying productive to provide one and suffer when they cannot stay productive.”

“We wanted to know how they were able to gain the focus and motivation they needed to do the work with all these shifting emotions,” she says. “What we found was that a great place to work can be made, not just joined.”

A company or organization helps center people psychologically because it creates a holding environment for their work identity that offers them a sense of place and value. Ashford and her colleagues found that independent workers create their own holding environment by making four distinct connections:

• Personal routines. Sticking to daily and personal routines helps set boundaries of working time and can help keep people productive when motivation lags. One worker said, “There are certain routines that I do that make me feel good when I get lost … I run these little routines and that makes me feel like I’m not totally out there on my own.”
• Physical places. A number of study participants formed deep bonds with specific spaces that evoked their working self. These spaces helped confine and bolster their work self, sheltering them from the distractions and distress that eat into productivity. One software engineer described his home office as a “fighter pilot cockpit,” suggesting what he needed to take on the world as an independent.
• People. Every participant mentioned people they drew on for reassurance and encouragement. Few were members of peer groups, but all reached out to specific people who helped with their creativity, productivity, and sanity. These essential people helped soothe the anxieties that come with independent work and make the process more joyful and less lonely.
• A broader purpose. A sense of purpose was an important success factor for independent workers. It focused and elevated their working selves and helped them to see their work as connected to the world at large. This helped them get past the daily struggles and keep their eyes on the broader significance of what they chose to do. One music consultant said, “It was Ronald Reagan who said — actually it was Peggy Noonan who said through the mouth of Ronald Reagan — ‘America is a song culture.’ That’s how we get so much of our values. And I think it’s important that I could influence the culture through good songs.”

“These connections don’t make the tension associated with independent work disappear, but the holding environment they create keeps it tolerable and helps them manage the work day,” says Ashford. “As one of our participants said, ‘There is no arriving, that’s a myth.’ But when they create this work holding environment for themselves, the tensions become a source of learning and motivation. It makes their precariousness tolerable, something they can live with and even thrive on.”

As the gig economy grows so will the need for more insights on how people can build a successful work life in the new reality. Ashford and her co-authors hope their research can help newly independent workers learn from those who have found a way to thrive on their own.

This article was originally published as a Ross Thought in Action article