Age and job crafting: How and why do employees of different ages craft their job?

Job crafting refers to self-initiated behaviors through which employees adjust their job to accommodate intrapersonal changes in personal resources to promote successful aging at work. Despite the growing popularity of job crafting, research focusing on the relationship between job crafting and age has been scarce. In this chapter we discuss age differences in how and why employees craft their jobs. In addition, we report findings of a qualitative interview study on job crafting among 80 employees of different ages and engaged in different jobs and organizations. Using the job crafting typology proposed by Zhang and Parker (2019) and the job crafting motives proposed by Kooij et al. (2021), we find support for 6 out of 8 job crafting types and two additional job crafting motives. Although older workers engage more in job crafting for accommodative motives and different crafting motives trigger different job crafting types, there seems to be few age differences in job crafting types and motives and their interconnections.