Daphne van der Kruijssen is a PhD student at the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. After working for 2.5 years in the HR business world, Daphne started in 2015 as a junior lecturer in Human Resource Studies at Tilburg University. Since September 2017 she’s a PhD Candidate in job crafting supervised by Dorien Kooij, Marianne van Woerkom and Marc van Veldhoven. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) will play an important role in the study on job crafting.
Job crafting behavior is about the customization of your job. You design your job in such a way that it optimally suits you. Dorien Kooij and Marianne van Woerkom give an example in their study ‘Job crafting towards strengths and interests’. Someone who assists the disabled at a care institution loves making music and crafted his job in such a way that he started making music together with disabled people. As such, with job crafting, you reframe, redesign your job in ways that make you feel more engaged and happy in your job.
Diary study
In September, Daphne started a diary study on job crafting in order to get a sense of relevant predictors of job crafting behavior. In particular, Daphne is interested in learning more about the potential influence of energy on personal resources and how these personal resources steer job crafting behavior.
Indicating fluctuations with ESM
Why are you able to craft your job one moment and not the next? With intensive data (ESM) with an app for example, you can study such fluctuations in job crafting behavior. One can also use a passive monitoring device such as a Fitbit to register sleep patterns and investigate the extent to which sleep affects your energy level. The expectation is that not only the quantity, but also the quality of sleep matters. In general, you’ll be more resilient if you have more energy. When feeling energetic, employees are better able to craft their job by seeking the best possible fit between person and job (person job fit).
Individual approach
ESM has tremendous added value for job crafting studies. Daphne: ‘Within HR, the average employee is often the starting point, while I believe in the individual employee. Every organization and every individual is different. It is innovative to look at individual patterns in HR studies. What may work for one person does not have to work for another.’
Open for collaborations
Daphne meets regularly with other PhD students to exchange knowledge. She looks forward working together with colleagues from other departments, e.g., Methodology and Statistics, to get the most out of the collected ESM data: ‘In addition, I am open to other collaborations to demonstrate the added value of ESM. It is important that TESC facilitates cooperation and that you know how to find each other’.