Job satisfaction is critical for both job performance and organizational effectiveness. A major contributor to employee job satisfaction is creating effective fit between an employee and their job responsibilities. Although traditional work design models have emphasized the role of managers in creating jobs that fit employees to enhance job satisfaction, contemporary organizations have recognized the importance of employee job crafting, whereby employees have control over designing their jobs to more closely fit their capabilities. Job crafting, and specifically task crafting (i.e., changing the number, scope, and procedures of tasks), plays an important role in fulling employees’ personal preferences and improving their job satisfaction. However, little is known about the sources of potential task crafting approaches. Adopting a social networks approach, we propose that weak instrumental ties and strong expressive ties play a critical role for both task crafting and job satisfaction. This study contributes to the job crafting literature by creating a framework that defines who provides the social resources that are critical to task crafting and explaining how and why different social resources embedded in different workplace relationships promote the task crafting process.
