Empowering Leadership, Social Support, and Job Crafting in Public Organizations: A Multilevel Study

• Author: Adelien Decramer,Bert George,Rufei Ma,Robin Bauwens,Mieke Audenaert,Jolien Muylaert,Anne-Marie Descamps,Anouk Decuypere
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0091026019873681
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026019873681

Public Personnel Management

2020, Vol. 49(3) 367 –392

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0091026019873681

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Article

Empowering Leadership,

Social Support, and

Job Crafting in Public

Organizations: A Multilevel

Study

Mieke Audenaert1, Bert George1,2,

Robin Bauwens1,3 , Anouk Decuypere1,

Anne-Marie Descamps1, Jolien Muylaert1,

Rufei Ma4, and Adelien Decramer1

Abstract

The public sector requires job crafting from employees so that they can better cope

with overdemanding jobs due to layer upon layer of public management reforms.

Simultaneously, however, red tape and austerity constrain job autonomy. This study

therefore tests how job crafting can be fostered in public organizations by studying

social resources at work and, specifically, empowering leadership and social support.

Multilevel analyses based on survey data from 1,059 nurses in 67 public elderly care

organizations in Flanders, Belgium, show that empowering leadership and social

support contribute to job crafting and, simultaneously, strengthen each other’s

contribution. Additional analyses showed that empowering leadership, social support,

as well as their interaction have differential relations vis-à-vis the different dimensions

of job crafting. The implications for public management are discussed.

Keywords

job crafting, empowering leadership, social support, overdemanding jobs, public

personnel management

1Ghent University, Belgium

2Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

3Tilburg University, The Netherlands

4Wuhan Business University, China

Corresponding Author:

Mieke Audenaert, Department of Marketing, Innovation and Organisation, Faculty of Economics and

Business Administration, Ghent University, Campus Tweekerken – Hoveniersberg, Tweekerkenstraat 2,

Ghent 9000, Belgium.

Email: mieke.audenaert@ugent.be

873681PPMXXX10.1177/0091026019873681Public Personnel ManagementAudenaert et al.

research-article2019

368 Public Personnel Management 49(3)

New Public Management (NPM) reforms, as well as austerity regimes throughout the

Western world, pose many challenges for the public sector, including the need to pro-

vide better services to citizens with fewer resources (Osborne & Brown, 2011; Walker,

2014). These challenges have led to organizational restructuring as well as decentral-

ization of power within the public sector. As a consequence, public leaders need to

adopt a new leadership style. Whereas public leaders had to resort to directive and

transactional leadership styles in the past, they are now more and more expected to

empower their employees so that they can behave proactively (Audenaert, Decramer,

George, Verschuere, & Van Waeyenberg, 2019a; De Vries, Bekkers, & Tummers, 2016),

which is labeled as an empowering leadership style (Vecchio, Justin, & Pearce, 2010).

Simultaneously, public-sector challenges have resulted in overdemanding jobs

(Audenaert, George, & Decramer, 2019b), which require public-sector employees to

proactively adapt to their job. Public-sector employees face increasing job demands—

due to, for instance, performance management systems, parsimonious resource alloca-

tion processes, short-term employment contracts, and so forth—that may harm

employees’ well-being (Jung, 2014). While job demands thus increase in public orga-

nizations, the possibility for burnout and other negative outcomes also increases

(Bakker, van Veldhoven, & Xanthopoulou, 2010). Hence, job crafting is of the utmost

importance for public organizations because it can help mitigate the negative effects of

high job demands on employees’ well-being. Through job crafting, employees proac-

tively redesign their own job to cope with the increasing job demands. This proactive

behavior is crucial to their well-being at work (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, &

Schaufeli, 2001). However, despite its argued importance (Wrzesniewski & Dutton,

2001) and the specific relevance of job crafting in the public sector, little is known

about the determinants of job crafting in the public sector (for an exception, see

Bakker, 2015). For the purpose of this study, data were collected among nurses in

Flemish public elderly care organizations.

Although empowering leadership is clearly relevant to address contemporary pub-

lic-sector challenges, its prevalence is subject to conflicting demands. In contrast with

the increasing demands for empowering leadership, red tape constrains public leaders’

managerial autonomy. Leaders are expected to guard the established rules and proce-

dures rather than the employees’ autonomy (Knies, Boselie, Gould-Williams, &

Vandenabeele, 2018). Also, the dominance of austerity constrains the professional

autonomy of employees, for instance, in health care organizations (Knies & Leisink,

2014). Nevertheless, job crafting is particularly relevant in the high-demand jobs, cur-

rently experienced by many public-sector employees worldwide (Noblet & Rodwell,

2009). The demands for empowering leadership to foster job crafting, on one hand, and

the context of red tape and austerity in the public sector, on the other hand, thus suggest

that public management research on this topic is particularly needed and salient.

Apart from constraining empowering leadership and job crafting, red tape and aus-

terity also limit the extent to which jobs can provide resources that are motivational and

positive to employees’ well-being (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006). When jobs cannot

be designed to entail motivational aspects, such as job autonomy and task variety, the

relevance of job crafting becomes particularly apparent. Although employees with