ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1376472
Antecedents for crafting a sense of coherence among healthcare employees
Provisionally accepted
- 1Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2Other, Huddinge, Sweden
- 3Department of Sociology and Work Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
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Job crafting–an active form of job redesign–has been widely studied within healthcare in recent years, possibly because of its many positive outcomes in this context. Job crafting can be described as actions to redesign a current work situation to increase the fit of a person's abilities, resources, and desires. Among the positive consequences of job crafting are employee well-being, work engagement, and a productive workforce. The Swedish healthcare sector struggles with challenging work environments and staff shortages, and health-promoting activities can thus be particularly important for employees' well-being. To identify antecedents of job crafting that can promote well-being within public healthcare, semi-structured interviews were conducted with employees and managers in five different healthcare departments. Departments with daytime activities only and 24/7 operations were represented in the study. On an individual level, being a driven person as well as focusing on the patient were found to precede health-promoting job crafting. Being a driven person indicates an ability to deal with restrictive work conditions, such as a lack of support among colleagues and managers, for those who choose to craft their jobs. Working autonomously or in cross-professional teams were contextual antecedents that led to a more comprehensible work situation and different degrees of perceived freedom in work. Utilizing these degrees of freedom through job crafting strategies with the patient's best interests in mind led to a work situation that was considered more manageable and meaningful. When planning how to facilitate health-promoting job crafting among healthcare employees, it is recommended to keep in mind that job crafting antecedents seem to interplay on different organizational and individual levels.
Keywords: health promotion1, job crafting antecedents2, Sense of coherence3, sustainable work4, system perspective5, healthcare employees6
Received: 02 Feb 2024; Accepted: 21 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jaldestad and Dellve. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ellen Jaldestad, ellkar@kth.se
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