Up for the Challenge: Need for Power Drives Employees to Craft Their Jobs and Create Positive Work Outcomes

Job crafting is the behavior that employees engage in to create personally better fitting work environments, for example, by increasing challenging job demands. To better understand the driving forces behind employees’ engagement in job crafting, we investigated both implicit motives (needs = n) and explicit motives (self-attributed needs = san). We focused on power motives, as power is an agentic motive characterized by the need to have impact on others. We expected a high explicit power motive (sanPower) to promote job crafting (H1) – especially if employees also have a high implicit power motive (nPower), thus indicating power motive congruence (H2). Furthermore, we expected job crafting to mediate the relationship between power motive congruence and work engagement (H3a) and job satisfaction (H3b). Finally, we expected work outcomes to correlate (H4). We conducted a cross-sectional study among a sample of Lebanese nurses (N = 360) working in hospital settings. In both implicit and explicit power motive measures, we focused on integrative power motive enactment that enable people to stay calm and integrate opposition. In our job crafting questionnaire, we focused on the dimension of increasing challenging job demands. The results showed that integrative sanPower predicted job crafting (H1) and that integrative nPower amplified this effect (H2). Furthermore, job crafting mediated the relationship between congruently high power motives and positive work-related outcomes (H3) that were interrelated (H4). Our findings unravel the driving forces behind one of the most important dimensions of job crafting and extend the benefits of motive congruence to work-related outcomes.