Job Crafting in Competitive Contexts: The Influence of Inter-team Competition and Leadership Orientation

This study examines how inter-team competition and team leadership orientation jointly influence team members’ job crafting within a multi-team organization. Drawing on social comparison theory and self-regulation theory, the authors hypothesized an inverted U-shaped relationship between inter-team competition and job crafting, whereby team members’ job crafting peaks under moderate levels of inter-team competition but declines when competition becomes excessive. Additionally, they proposed that this curvilinear relationship is moderated by team leaders’ orientation. They tested their hypotheses in a restaurant chain in China during the pandemic. Following exploratory interviews with 20 store managers to develop a contextually grounded job crafting measure, they collected survey data from 722 frontline employees nested within 133 store-based teams. Robust linear mixed-effects modeling supported the inverted U-shaped relationships between inter-team competition and employees’ task, relational, and cognitive crafting, with the strongest evidence for cognitive crafting. Furthermore, task-oriented leadership attenuated the curvilinear effect of competition on task crafting. These findings contribute to the job crafting literature by illustrating how structural competitive pressures and proximal leadership behaviors dynamically shape employee proactivity, offering practical insights for calibrating competitive structures and leadership approaches to create conditions that optimize employees’ job crafting.