The Influence of Living a Calling on Work Engagement for Knowledged Workers

The influence of calling on work engagement has attended to practitioners and researchers in recent years. However, there are few studies on the influence factor between living a calling and work engagement. This study explored the relationship between living a calling, job crafting, regulatory focus and work engagement for knowledged workers. Excluding the invalid questionnaires, 390 valid samples were obtained, with a validity rate of 59%.

The findings in this study are as follows. First, living a calling enables knowledged workers to experience more work significance and real self, which has a profound and important positive impact on their work and life. When they live a calling, they will do their best to craft their own jobs with strong work enthusiasm and psychological strength. Second, crafting challenging job demands can bring job stimulation and work fun to knowledged workers, thereby it can improve their work engagement. While crafting hindering job demands has a more complex impact on work engagement, rather than a simple linear relationship. Organizations and managers can enhance their challenging work needs of knowledged workers without paying too much attention to their hindering job needs. Third, the mediating role of the three groups of job crafting for knowledged workers between living a calling and work engagement is in turn crafting structural job resources, crafting challenging job demands and crafting social job resources. However, their crafting hindering job demands cannot mediate the relationship between living a calling and work engagement. Fourth, stimulating prevention focus of knowledged workers and reducing their promotion focus can help ease the relationship between living a calling and crafting hindering job demands. Last, promotion focus of knowledged workers can help to enhance the relationship between living a calling and work engagement.

In conclusion, this study not only provided insight into the possible mediating effect of job crafting but it also demonstrated the moderating effect of regulatory focus on the relationship of them for knowledged workers. These insights might help managers support living a calling, job crafting and regulatory focus for knowledged workers to achieve the goal of work engagement.