Leadership Development as an Enabler of Employee Job Crafting and Well-Being: Evidence From a Cluster-Randomized Field Experiment

Proactive, employee-led job redesign (job crafting) is widely promoted, but it remains unclear whether leader- or employee-focused interventions more effectively prompt job crafting and how any effects translate to well-being. We conducted a cluster-randomized field trial in a large UK organization (four departments; N = 276), assigning departments to a bottom-up job-crafting workshop, a top-down leadership-development program for line managers, both combined, or a wait-list control. Surveys at baseline and four months assessed job crafting, job characteristics (structural and social resources; challenge and hindrance demands), and well-being (meaning at work, job satisfaction, activated and relaxed affect). Baseline-adjusted path models with pre-specified design contrasts showed that leadership development increased employee job crafting at four months. Higher job crafting, in turn, predicted improved well-being and job satisfaction through gains in structural resources (job autonomy, task variety, development opportunities) and also directly enhanced meaning at work. Increases in challenge demands partially offset benefits for relaxed affect and job satisfaction. The employee job crafting workshop did not increase overall job crafting but did increase social resources and reduce hindrance demands; the combined condition yielded no additional benefit. Findings identify structural resources as the primary mechanism linking job crafting to health-relevant outcomes and position leadership development as an enabling condition for bottom-up work redesign. This cluster-randomized field experiment provides rare causal evidence that top-down leadership development can serve as a proximal antecedent of employee job crafting.