An explorative study on antecedents of job crafting among self-employed and employed accountants

Recent research on job design has introduced the idea that changes to the structure of the job can derive not only from the traditional top–down approach, consisting of changes imposed by supervisors, but can also originate from the down of the organization through employees’ proactive actions and behaviors. This idea is embedded in the concept of job crafting, which refers to the changes that individuals can bring to the content of the job, as well as to the social boundaries and cognitive framing that employees develop towards their tasks. In this paper, we present a qualitative study conducted with 21 self–employed and employed accountants operating in the Metropolitan City of Naples, Italy. Our study shows that both self–employed professionals and employed accountants can engage in job crafting. This finding provides an important contribution to the literature on job design by suggesting that job crafting is not only relevant for prescribed jobs, but it can be also applied to self–employed people. We also examined the antecedents that lead accountants to engage in job crafting. Interestingly, we found that autonomy, age and gender significantly influenced the extent to which accountants engaged in job crafting. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.