Cognitive job crafting: A possible response to increasing job insecurity and declining professional prestige

Recent research has shown that job crafting, which describes individuals' attempts to craft a job to make it correspond more to personal inclinations, skills, and abilities, can generate significant work and nonwork benefits for individuals. Using the theoretical lens of activation theory, we examined whether professionals are prompted to cognitively craft their jobs in response to the increasing perception of precarisation of their profession, measured in terms of job insecurity and perceived external prestige. We adopted a mixed methods approach among professional accountants operating in Southern Italy and the results indicated the presence of two curvilinear relationships. More specifically, we found that accountants were more likely to engage in cognitive crafting when experiencing moderate levels of job insecurity (rather than high or low) and in the presence of both low and high levels of perceived external prestige (rather than a moderate level). Implications for theory and practice are discussed.