Abstract
The purpose of this developmental paper is to revisit the theory of a prominent proactive behaviour, job crafting. We focus on job crafters, who are proactive employees and not passive implementers of orders. Specifically, we study a newly introduced element of job crafting, selfergy, that describes how job crafters make their job their own in a unique way and by doing so they reveal their true self at the workplace. Given the novelty of selfergy and the subsequent lack of empirical evidence on it, our study attempts to inform the literature on this concept by investigating the factors that positively affect it.
Employing a quantitative methodology we investigated the impact of calling, locus of control and courage on selfergy. A cross sectional study on 206 academics was conducted through an online survey. Our preliminary results are consisted of a regression analysis, which showed that all factors have a positive statistically significant effect on selfergy, with calling making the largest unique contribution on selfergy, followed by courage and locus of control. Since this developmental study refers to work that is still in progress, our paper primarily intends to start a discussion on the potential factors that associate with selfergy, and address those in a more comprehensive manner. We further intend to investigate the impact of selfergy to organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction and positive mark, so that fuller understanding of the concept of selfergy will be attained.