Examining Nonlinear Effects of Crafting Social Resources on Work Engagement - the Moderating Role of Exhaustion

Crafting social resources is a job crafting strategy that implies changing one's social job resources to improve person-job fit and work-related well-being. Previous research has mostly assumed a resource-generating nature of crafting social resources and investigated the linear positive effects of this job crafting strategy on, for example, work engagement. Considering that crafting social resources can also be resource-consuming, in this paper, we referred to conservation of resources theory and resource allocation theory and proposed a curvilinear, U-shaped relationship between crafting social resources and work engagement. We further predicted that exhaustion would moderate this curvilinear relationship. To test our hypotheses, a two-wave study with 233 employees was conducted. Consistent with our assumptions, compared with a low or high level, a moderate (i.e., occasional) level of crafting social job resources was associated with a lower level of work engagement three months later. Furthermore, exhaustion acted as a moderator insomuch that a low level of exhaustion mitigated the detrimental effect of crafting social resources at a moderate level on work engagement. Accordingly, the findings showed that crafting social resources is not always beneficial and can impair employees' work engagement, especially for exhausted employees.