DefinePK

Abstract

Academicians in Higher Education Institutes are required to exhibit proactive behavior in order to demonstrate continuous learning, quality research and creative thinking. Job crafting is one such proactive behavior where academicians craft the tasks, relationships and cognitive understanding of their jobs meaningfully. This positive involvement in the job results in their psychological empowerment. Although psychological empowerment also requires various facilitating resources, the demanding nature of a job exerts physical and psychological pressures that sometimes lead to employee burn out and stress. The purpose of this research is to identify the effect of job crafting on psychological empowerment of university academicians with the moderating effect of demanding nature of a job. The survey of 209 academicians from different universities in Karachi was carried out for this purpose. Process Macro and regression analysis measured the impact of the opportunity of job crafting on the psychological empowerment among faculty members while determining the effects of demanding job factors such as time pressure, work load, variety of tasks, emotional interaction with people and poor environmental conditions. The results show that while the impact of job crafting is significantly positive on the psychological empowerment of academicians, the moderating relationship between job crafting and psychological empowerment is interestingly found out to be negligible. While this finding is unexpectedly different from the conclusion of previous researches, yet it is highly interesting to account for the reasons that yield these results. This increases the academic and practical significance of the study because it explores those avenues of job crafting, psychological empowerment and demanding nature of job that were not explored in the context of HEIs of Pakistan before.