When are Job Autonomy and Workload “Too Much of a Good Thing” for Job Crafting?

Based upon the meta-theoretical perspective of “too much of a good thing” and the vitamin model, which suggests the potential for non-monotonic effects of job characteristics on employee outcomes, we hypothesize nonlinear (i.e., inverse U-shaped) relations between job autonomy, workload, and task, relational, and cognitive forms of job crafting. Additionally, based on an integration of the vitamin model with trait activation theory, we posit that such relations are especially strong for people with higher (vs. lower) dispositional proactivity. We consider data from a baseline survey and 37 additional waves of longitudinal data, collected over 46 months between December 2019 and October 2023 among a sample of n = 1,161 employees in Germany. We find mixed evidence for nonlinear between- and within-person associations among job autonomy, workload, and job crafting. Notably, non-linear relations between job autonomy and workload were consistently observed across all three forms of job crafting at the within-person, but not the between-person level of analysis. However, in only a few cases did such within-person relations take the form of an inverse U-shape, with other relations suggesting a diminishing positive association of job autonomy and workload with job crafting. Nonlinear within-person associations between job autonomy and all three forms of job crafting were especially strong for people with relatively higher (vs. lower) proactive personality. Thus, experiencing high job autonomy may present “too much of a good thing” for job crafting, especially for people with high dispositional proactivity. However, dispositional proactivity does not operate in the same way for workload.