Impact of Job Crafting, Work Stress on Employee Engagement: A Study of a Leading IT Organization in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Although the theoretical background and job crafting outcomes are well documented, previous studies have found the IT industry employees are suffering from huge work stress where there is a lack of theoretical contribution regarding the work engagement of employees in the IT industry. Thereby, the current study attempts to identify the impact of job crafting on work engagement by exploring the mediating effect of work stress in between the relationship of job crafting and work engagement of employees in the IT industry of Sri Lanka. The simple random sampling technique was applied to select the sample, and the sample size has consisted of 335 employees of Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd, Sri Lanka. Data was collected through a Google Form. The data were analyzed by using the correlation, regression, and Sobel test where most of the analyses are done with the aid of SPSS. It is found that, there is a significant positive moderate impact of job crafting on work engagement. Further, this study recognized that there is a significant week negative relationship between job crafting and work stress and also in between work stress and work engagement. Additionally, this study has revealed that work stress significantly mediates the relationship between job crafting and work engagement while behaving as a partial mediator. Finally, it is concluded that the IT organizations can reduce their employees’ work stress by successfully implementing the job crafting concept within their organization where it will directly affect the employee engagement to improve further. It is suggested that managers should create a supportive environment where employees can interact and add more valuable tasks to their daily responsibilities. Further, the government of Sri Lanka can implement job crafting concept successfully in their public sector. It is better if the future researchers can use the longitudinal study and go for a bigger sample size to make their future research on the same area to be a more successful one.