The influence of workplace friendship on job crafting: based on affective events theory.

With the continuous development of Internet technology and digital economy, the external environment is constantly impacting the nature of work and existing work structures, making work highly ambiguous, dynamic and decentralized, and the work environment has become more uncertain and complex. In this work environment, the emphasis is on employees as well as the organization to react quickly and act proactively. A related and much talked about concept is job crafting. A compilation of the existing literature reveals that individual-led job crafting behavior is influenced by a variety of factors. However, little attention has been paid to the impact of employee relations on job crafting in the workplace. Therefore, this study investigates the influence of workplace friendships related to employee relationships on job crafting in the workplace. Based on affective events theory and broaden-and-build theory, we suggest that positive emotions mediate the influence of workplace friendships on job crafting and are influenced by individualism/collectivism and job autonomy. As hypothesized, we analyzed the data collected from 504 employees from Chinese companies and the results supported our research hypothesis. Confirmatory factor analysis was first applied and then hierarchal regression was used to test the research hypotheses. The results show that workplace friendship has a positive effect on job crafting, positive emotion mediates between workplace friendship and job crafting, collectivism moderates between workplace friendship and positive emotion, and job autonomy moderates between positive emotion and job crafting. The theoretical implications of our findings are that they confirm the importance of workplace friendship as an antecedent variable for job crafting and extend the research related to the antecedent variables of job crafting to the relational aspect. Our findings reveal the importance of properly managing workplace friendships in order to promote personal job crafting, as well as the need for companies to focus on enhancing positive emotions and giving employees more autonomy at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]