Crafting workforce stability: Divergent mechanisms of individual and collaborative job crafting to job embeddedness in restaurants

Abstract

Job crafting, an employee-initiated proactive behavior, is increasingly crucial in the hospitality industry for enhancing employee performance and managing human resource challenges amidst technological shifts. Grounded in Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, the study addresses a significant research gap in understanding workforce stability by examining how employees gain and protect resources through individual and collaborative job crafting, and how these resource processes influence job embeddedness among frontline employees and supervisors in U.S. restaurants via emotional exhaustion and organizational identification. Two studies were conducted with 201 frontline employees and 146 supervisors from the U.S. restaurant industry. Structural equation modelling was used for data analysis. The results reveal that individual job crafting directly enhances job embeddedness across both groups. In contrast, collaborative job crafting indirectly affects job embeddedness through emotional exhaustion and organizational identification for frontline employees, and only through organizational identification for supervisors. The study advances COR theory by identifying distinct resource pathways that foster job embeddedness for different employee groups and offers practical recommendations for restaurant managers seeking to strengthen workforce stability through job crafting practices.