Can Job Crafting Improve Perceived Marketability?

With the development of economic globalization,competition among organizations is increasingly intensified.In order to adapt to the transformation of technology and the development models,most enterprises tend to be streamlined and flattened.Most companies have been unable to protect the safety of their employees,and the task of career life management has gradually returned to the employees themselves.In addition,the aging of population in workplace makes the age differences between employees in the same organization increasingly large.Employees across different age need to adapt to the changing workplace environment.These changes require employees to plan ahead and take the initiative to design their own work,rather than relying solely on top-down work design from the organization.This bottom-up job design is named job crafting,which means a series of tasks that employees make to change their work tasks or relationship boundaries.The main reason for employees to take job crafting is to align their interests,motivations,and passions with their work.It enables employees to reconstruct their work content,work methods and work relationships on their own.And then people can gain work meaning and identity.In recent years,many scholars studied job crafting,as it is crucial for employees to adapt to the turbulent modem occupational environment and manage their own career.However,few researchers have examined the long-term impact of job crafting on individual career development.Based on modern career development theory and the circumstance,few employees can stay in one or a few organizations during their whole career life.Most of the career development paths of contemporary employees are turbulent and diversified,so it is necessary to discuss the influence of job crafting on the career development of individual employees.The latest empirical research supports the decisive role of individual needs and motivational factors in employeejob crafting behavior(Bindl,Unsworth,Gibson,&Stride,2018).Therefore,this study is based on the job crafting framework of Self-Determination Theory,and further focuses on the specific motivational antecedent variable of occupational future time perspective.Through a three,wave time-lagged study across eight months,this paper discusses the dual path model about the influencing mechanism of job crafting on career development under the influence of occupational future time perspective.The specific research design is as follows:In the first study,I designed a "motivation-behavior-result" framework of "future time perspective-job crafting-marketability." Through the tracking survey of 170 enterprise employees,we investigated the internal mechanism of future time perspective on individual career development.It turns out that individual's open-ended FTP at TI stage predicts the promoted-job crafting at T2 stage significantly.In addition,promoted-job crafting has a positive impact on both the perceived internal marketability and perceived external marketability at T3 stage.However,the limited-FTP has little effect on prevention-job crafting.The mediating role of prevention-job crafting between limited-FTP and marketability is not supported.On the basis of the first study,the second study continues to explore the mechanism of promotion-job crafting exert an influence on career development,and distinguish the outcome variable into perceived internal marketability and perceived external marketability.It turns out that promotion-job crafting can increase employee's resources.On the one hand,it motivate them to focus more on current work,improve employee's dynamism,and thus improve the level of perceived marketability within an organization.On the other hand,promotion-job crafting behavior will enhance employees,career competitiveness,which is a vital personal resources during the boundaryless career era,and then enhance people's perceived external marketability.