As we’ve learnt over the four posts of my mini-blog-post-series on job crafting, almost anyone in any job can do job crafting, including people in a public sector career in New Zealand. What’s job crafting? If you missed the earlier posts, job crafting is a process that you can use to reshape your role to better fit your work preferences and career goals.
You might be sceptical though: ‘What about my specific job? I don’t think job crafting will work.’
And you may be right.
I’m going to be honest. While countless research studies have proven job crafting to be effective as a way to achieve better engagement, work wellbeing and job satisfaction, work sustainability and professional growth, there are times when leaving your role to start over in another organisation is going to be the right thing for your health and career development.
To help you out, today’s post is going to lay out clearly both when your role can be crafted, and when it probably can’t.
Signs you can reshape your role with job crafting
The foundational condition for job crafting almost goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway! (just in case) There needs to be some kind of misfit between you and your job. Perhaps it’s all pretty good, but you don’t have quite enough challenge. Perhaps you have plenty of challenge and responsibility, but not enough task variety. Perhaps the task variety and challenge levels are high, but you don’t feel fully supported by the people around you because they’re not really your ‘tribe’. If there isn’t some kind of gap, and your job is going well, you’re unlikely to have the motivation to change anything. And chances are, you probably wouldn’t be here reading a career coaching blog post!
On top of inadequate person-job fit, the job crafting research by Maria Tims and Arnold Bakker (2010) suggests that having a good degree of autonomy and high task independence in your role also facilitate job crafting. Petrou et al. (2017) found that being a proactive person with self-efficacy makes a difference, and Audenaert et al. (2020) found that your job crafting will be helped on its way if you have an empowering manager and supportive colleagues.
An important thing to note is that even though job crafting is a process that starts with you, the employee, when you reshape your role, chances are there’ll be times when you’ll need to get the buy-in of your manager, or to at least keep them abreast of your job crafting efforts. So having a manager that’s open to the conversation is helpful.
None of these things stop you job crafting but the path towards a redesigned and more satisfied and growth-oriented job will be smoother when you have these personal characteristics and people around you in your job. I want to flag though that, while having autonomy and task independence are facilitating of job crafting, I’d argue that there still needs to be opportunity for you to ring the changes. I mean, if the tasks of your role really are 100% set in stone, and even how you do them is prescribed for you, it’ll narrow the range of your job crafting options.
Signs job crafting won’t work - and might not serve your wellbeing
However, if any of the following situations are true for you, you might need to make the call to leave your current role and organisation.
There’s a toxic team or organisational culture. If excessive workloads are an expectation in your team or organisation, there are unclear boundaries between work and personal life, leadership is fear-based or there is micromanagement, you’re unlikely to have the relational capital and, more importantly, the managerial and collegial support that you need for job crafting. Plus, a toxic culture makes work life unpleasant, and even if you craft in the challenge and growth you want, that toxicity will still be there.
A dysfunctional structure and organisation. Even if you succeed in making improvements to your own role, clunky processes, office politics and territory wars, the need for interagency collaboration or approvals, or just finding it hard to ‘find the right person’ to help you are all going to hold you back. Over a short period, I think working in this kind of environment can be tolerated, but in my own experience, beyond a year or so it can become draining. It takes the edge off your job satisfaction, and staying at an organisation that isn’t well regarded more broadly in the public sector can start to feel like a risk for your own professional reputation and career growth.
Acute job insecurity. Organisational restructures of various types and scales continue in the New Zealand public sector, and if a restructure is under consultation at your workplace, there may be an imminent risk to your role. If that’s the case, it may not be the best time to invest energy and effort in job crafting. Though you could make a case that it would represent you trying your best 'til the very end, and there’d be reputational value in that!
If job crafting doesn’t make sense, what then?
When you’re suffering at work from a toxic team or organisational culture, from the inability of the organisation to function effectively, or from the anxiety of likely job loss, most likely you’re going to want to escape. It’s really important to be your own advocate for your wellbeing and career development.
Working out what that next step is or could be is a much bigger conversation than what we can cover in this one blog post. Though, having a clearer idea through a close-up examination of your current job demands and job resources – in comparison to what you’d like those to look like – will help inform the direction you take and what future roles you consider. Seeking career advice or career coaching can help too.
My new ‘Can we job craft it?’ job audit coaching session includes an analysis of your current job’s demands and resources to see which areas have scope to be bolstered or reshaped. The pre-session assessment might show, for example, that you don’t have sufficient opportunities to use the variety of skills you bring to the role and enjoy using. Or, it might indicate that your social resources could do with some investment so you have more support to chase more challenge in your role.
Seeing the demands and resources of your job laid out clearly, and seeing where the gaps are, both gives you a direction for job crafting, or a way to evaluate future roles elsewhere.
I'll start piloting the session in late October (2026). So if you're interested, find out more about the job audit session on the webpage or get in touch with me by email or on LinkedIn to make a booking.