Cognitive crafting as a key trigger in a person’s proactive work construction

Abstract

Proactive design of a person’s work (job crafting) is becoming the leading trend in the scientific literature and one of the promising educational practices that combine individual mentoring with training support. There are two areas of research that focus on: 1) goal setting, relationship formation and cognitive abilities; 2) determining job requirements and finding resources to optimize the working process. A flaw in many studies is that they are overly focused on either task repackaging or networking, thereby missing the important role of how people understand their work in relation to their interests, values and meaning in life. In order to fill this gap, we conducted a meta-analysis of research literature reviews in the field of job crafting in the period from 2001 (the first mention of the term in the scientific literature) to the present. One of the revealing results of our analysis is that cognitive crafting is recognized as a priority in intervention programs at the theoretical level, but at the practical level there is a lack of specific methods aimed at diagnostics and pedagogical impact. The article substantiates the understanding of cognitive crafting of work as an important proactive strategy for personal selfregulation, aimed at rethinking the existing relationship between the subject and the environment in order to achieve full self-realization. We prove that cognitive crafting should be considered the key trigger in launching the entire mechanism of an employee’s proactive behavior at work. This article can contribute to the understanding of the role of individual perception of the context in which an employee is vanced research on cognitive crafting is related to the study of its influence on the innovative potential of an individual in solving organizational problems, as well as on stress resistance and human productivity. In this article, we rely on the activation theory (Gardner, Cummings 1988), the theory of meaning (Leontiev 2003) and the idea of a person’s search for meaning (Frankl 1990) to propose a generalized approach to cognitive crafting and its definition for subsequent psychometric operationalization. We emphasize that cognitive crafting is a tool for increasing a person’s self-worth at work and forming a positive organizational and professional identity to achieve a balance between work and personal life.