The Dark And The Bright Side Of Workers’ Participation Examined Through The Lens Of Job Crafting

Available literature on employees’ participation to decision making in the workplace emphasizes both its benefit in terms of work performance and its danger in terms of increased job stressors. In this study we contribute to such debate by examining how participation may influence different job crafting behaviors and how these, in turn, may generate different effects on performance and significant job stressors such as role conflict and role overload. We also examine the moderating effect of job autonomy. Our results show that participation is positively related to performance and negatively related to role conflict and role overload thanks to its influence on specific behaviors aimed at increasing structural job resources. We also found that participation may indeed increase role conflict and role overload via job crafting behaviors aimed at increasing challenging demands. Finally, we found that autonomy plays an interesting role in moderating the effect of participation on both performance and role overload and role conflict via job crafting.