Mediating Role of Job Crafting in the Relationship Between Creativity and Work Exhaustion

Introduction

Employees’ work environments and designs have changed considerably since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (Bai, Tian, & Liu, 2021). Workers’ lives commonly include makeshift bedroom offices, endless video conferences, and crying babies during work hours (Wang, Liu, Qian, & Parker, 2021). With these unexpected changes, many employees experience problems adapting, a strong sense of job insecurity, and emotional exhaustion (Spagnoli & Molinaro, 2020; Tang, Ma, Nauman, & Xing, 2020). These negative emotional experiences associated with the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to work exhaustion, also known as emotional exhaustion, a psychological stress symptom that reflects a negative response to emotional and interpersonal stressors at work (Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004), which can negatively affect work performance and increase turnover (Saleem, Malik, & Qureshi, 2021).

Research has shown that female employees experience greater levels of emotional exhaustion than their male counterparts (Andrade & Neves, 2022; Teja, 2021). Thus, it is critical to explore ways to help women mitigate increased work exhaustion. In addition, employee responses to the pandemic may differ by industry. Employees in knowledge-intensive industries, who likely require a higher level of concentration to complete their tasks, may be particularly affected by the changes brought about by the pandemic. In addition, responses to work exhaustion during the pandemic may differ by sex because women have been found to experience higher levels of stress (e.g., Kneavel, 2021). Given the potential for female knowledge workers to be especially susceptible to experiencing the negative effects of stressful events, the present study focuses on female attorneys’ responses to work exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the effects of work exhaustion can be serious (e.g., Osei, Konadu & Osei-Kwame, 2022), it is crucial to identify the factors associated with its development. Previous research revealed three antecedents of work exhaustion: work or family environment, work characteristics, and employee motivation. Work or family environment includes social support from organizations, leadership style, and work-family conflict (Karatepe, 2010). Work characteristics include pressure, workload, and job complexity (Lotta, Fernandez, Pimenta, & Wenham, 2021). Research on employee motivation as an antecedent of work exhaustion has found that certain types of motivation can reduce work exhaustion (Spagnoli & Molinaro, 2020). For instance, employees experienced less exhaustion if they engaged in work tasks that they were interested in or actively chose instead of completing tasks involving external or internal pressure. Regarding employee characteristics and behaviors predicting exhaustion, some studies have explored the contribution of employees’ emotional labor to work exhaustion (Kim & Leach, 2021). Given the wide-ranging effects of work exhaustion, further research is needed to clarify the contributions of other employee characteristics and behaviors to work exhaustion.

One characteristic that makes attorneys’ work relatively unique is that they often work in small teams on different cases, with a constantly changing team and work environment, as opposed to a more fixed working environment. As such, attorneys’ work environments generally entail a high degree of job autonomy, which requires them to rely on their own resources and abilities to solve problems and handle work rather than relying on their employers. Thus, examining the factors associated with work exhaustion in attorneys offers fruitful research opportunities that have received little scholarly attention.

One factor that we expect to mitigate attorney work exhaustion is creativity and the creation of new and useful ideas or solutions (Fisher & Barrett, 2019). As creativity can boost work effectiveness, it may be viewed as an individual resource that varies from person to person. Creativity facilitates employees’ proactive behavior, perceived insider status, and career satisfaction (Bourmistrov & Åmo, 2022). Given the positive outcomes of creativity, such as increased career satisfaction and proactive behaviors, creativity seems to have the potential to reduce work exhaustion. We are not aware of any published studies on this relationship. This study examines female attorney creativity, an individual resource, as an antecedent of work exhaustion.

If creativity is considered a resource that can be used to reduce work exhaustion, it is important to identify the mechanism through which employees use creativity to mitigate negative job outcomes. Our study proposes that this mechanism may be explained by job crafting, the process through which employees change their work in personally meaningful ways using their resources (Bai et al., 2021). Many studies have shown that job crafting produces positive outcomes, including increased work engagement and well-being (e.g., Rudolph, Katz, Lavigne, & Zacher, 2017). Several antecedents of job crafting have been identified, including individual characteristics (Kim & Beehr, 2021), job characteristics (Ghazzawi, Bender, Daouk-Oyry, van de Vijver, & Chasiotis, 2021), organizational policies and systems (Berdicchia, Bracci, & Masino, 2021) and leadership (Wang, Demurouti, & Le Blanc, 2017). Considering the findings of the existing research, we propose that job crafting explains how employees use creativity to access resources to mitigate work exhaustion. Accordingly, this study addressed the following question: What role does job crafting play in the relationship between female attorneys’ workplace creativity and work exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic? Our study uses resource-gain development (RGD) theory (Shi, She, Zhou, Zhang, & Zhang, 2022) to explain how job crafting acts as the mechanism through which employees use creativity to mitigate work exhaustion. The RGD theory, a robust framework rooted in a positive workplace, gain-sharing, and resource-based perspective, proposes that individuals are motivated to grow, develop, and pursue the highest quality of life in their work and personal lives (Shi et al., 2022). Individuals use their resources (e.g., creativity in the current study) to make positive gains (e.g., job crafting in the current study) that facilitate positive outcomes (e.g., reducing work exhaustion in the current study).

We also expected individual differences in the relationships between creativity, job crafting, and work exhaustion. Specifically, we anticipate that cultural values will enhance the positive relationship between creativity and job crafting and amplify the effect of job crafting on the relationship between creativity and work exhaustion. Some studies have begun to explore the impact of cultural values on workplace attitudes and behaviors (Fan, 2021; Sun, Guo, Wang, Sun, & Wang, 2021; Wei, Chen, Zhang, & Zhang, 2020; Yang, Ji, & Zu, 2021). This study examines Zhongyong, an indigenous Chinese cultural value rooted in Confucian philosophy. Zhongyong is generally thought to include numerous elements, but our research focuses on the integrated thinking element of Zhongyong, involving people’s propensities to fit together various viewpoints (e.g., judgments, arguments, and thoughts) and to preserve relational accord. This type of integrated thinking may help female attorneys maximize the benefits of creativity. As such, we propose that Zhongyong acts as a moderator by helping attorneys in China utilize individuals’ resources of creativity and buffer work exhaustion through relational crafting.

Method

Results

MeasuresConfirmatory Factors Analysis

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to examine the discriminant validity of the variables. The goodness-of-fit indices of the proposed four-factor model were χ²/df = 3.88, RMSEA = 0.06, CFI = 0.968, TLF = 0.959, and SRMR = 0.033 (Table 1). When we combined all four variables into one, the indices of the one-factor model were χ²/df = 37.81, RMSEA = 0.211, CFI = 0.498, TLF = 0.414, and SRMR = 0.159. The indices of the two-factor model (Zhongyong, creativity, relational crafting combined into one factor, and work exhaustion as a separate factor) included χ²/df = 28.63, RMSEA = 0.183, CFI = 0.628, TLF = 0.560, and SRMR = 0.145. The indices of the three-factor model (combining Zhongyong and creativity into one variable and relational crafting and work exhaustion separately) included the following: χ²/df = 15.80, RMSEA = 0.134, CFI = 0.860, TLF = 0.560, SRMR = 0.122. Hence, the four-factor model offered a superior fit. Given the accepted guidelines that CFI, NFI, and TLI values should be greater than 0.90 (Hooper, Coughlan, & Mullen, 2008), the discriminant validity of the variables was deemed acceptable.

Table 1

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Correlations, Means, and Standard Deviations

Table 2 reports the correlations, means, and standard deviations in our study. A significant positive association was found between relational crafting and creativity (r = 0.488, p < 0.01). In addition, exhaustion was negatively related to creativity (r = -0.200, p < 0.01) and relational crafting (r = -0.241, p < 0.01). Zhongyong was positively related to creativity (r = 0.388, p < 0.01), relational crafting (r = 0.253, p < 0.01), and exhaustion (r = 0.143, p < 0.01).

Table 2

Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations

Hypotheses Testing

To test our hypotheses, a path model was used to simultaneously estimate all coefficients presented in Table 3. The results showed that creativity was positively associated with relational crafting (b = 0.451, p < 0.001). Thus, H1 is supported. Relational crafting was negatively associated with work exhaustion (b = -0.202, p < 0.01), thus supporting H2. Analyses from 5000 bias-corrected bootstrap (Hayes, 2013) revealed a significant indirect effect (b = -0.091, Boot SE = 0.029, 95 percent CI = [-0.150, -0.036]) of creativity on work exhaustion via relational crafting, as zero is not contained in the 95 percent confidence interval for the indirect effect. Hence, H3 is supported.

Table 3

Path Analysis

Furthermore, as shown in Figure 1 and Table 3, Zhongyong’s moderating effect on the relationship between creativity and relational crafting was significant (b = 0.284, p < 0.001). Thus, H4 is supported.

Figure 1.

Moderating effect of Zhongyong

The regression results are shown in Figure 1. Table 4 shows the conditional indirect effects of creativity on work exhaustion via relational crafting at the lower, average, and higher Zhongyong levels. The higher and lower levels of the moderators were plus and minus one standard deviation from the mean, respectively. The results showed that the mediation effect was significant (b = -0.010, p < 0.001), indicating that H5 was supported.

Table 4

Moderated mediation model

Discussion

One of the many negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers worldwide is emotional exhaustion (Spagnoli & Molinaro, 2020), with female employees experiencing higher levels than their male counterparts (Andrade & Neves, 2022; Teja, 2021). A key finding of our study on female attorneys in China is that employees can engage in relational crafting to maximize the benefits of creativity in preventing emotional exhaustion. This finding complements previous research, which found that job crafting is required for creative ideas to be facilitated into a related positive outcome: subjective well-being (Ghawazzi et al., 2021).

Our mediation finding may be explained by the RGD theory, which proposes that workers are motivated to grow, develop, and pursue the highest quality of life in their work and personal lives (Shi et al., 2022). Thus, we found that they used creative resources to elicit positive gains in the form of relational crafting, which facilitated the benefit of lower levels of emotional exhaustion. In keeping with the RGD theory, the more creative resources attorneys perceived, the greater the likelihood of positive gains because they used their resources to obtain new information by building and maintaining work relationships, which had the added benefit of lower exhaustion. Prior to our study, existing literature on creativity and exhaustion lacked an empirical explanation of how employees’ creative efforts might mitigate their emotional exhaustion. In summary, the most important finding of our study is that relational crafting is the mechanism through which employees use creativity to mitigate work exhaustion.

The second key finding is that work creativity directly facilitates the relational crafting of female attorneys. By establishing a link between creativity and relational crafting, we gain insight into how creativity contributes to positive workplace dynamics. We are aware of only one previous study that examined creativity as a predictor of job crafting (Ghazzawi et al., 2021). Our results suggest that when employees use their creative resources to generate ideas, they gain new resources by interacting more deeply with their coworkers, including those with whom they are not well acquainted, to further develop their ideas or gain their support. Therefore, under stressful circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, to encourage attorneys to reshape their social relationships to enhance their work, supervisors can take action to cultivate female attorneys’ work creativity. For example, organizations can flatten their organizational structures by allowing attorneys to choose their work relationships and gain more control over their work.

Third, our study found that attorney relational crafting helped mitigate exhaustion. Our sample of female attorneys in China practices law in a knowledge-intensive industry; thus, emotional exhaustion has the potential to have a more harmful effect on their performance than that of workers in less knowledge-intensive industries. Our finding that relational crafting prevents exhaustion is consistent with previous research, which found that relational crafting is positively associated with well-being at work (de Devotto, Freitas, & Wechsler, 2020). It appears that employees who devote efforts toward building and maintaining work relationships enjoy the benefits of positive well-being and lower levels of work exhaustion because these efforts increase their pool of resources. This finding contributes to our understanding of the ways to prevent emotional exhaustion among female employees through work relationships.

It is important to note that the benefits to the workplace may extend beyond mitigating the negative effects of emotional exhaustion. Given the positive relationship between creativity and relational crafting, fostering creativity can lead to collaborative and harmonious work environments. Employees adept at using creative skills to build and nurture relationships are likely to contribute positively to teamwork and cooperation. By teaching employees how to leverage their creative abilities to build connections and improve workplace relationships, organizations can enhance teamwork and interpersonal effectiveness.

The link between creativity and relational job crafting and lower levels of women’s emotional exhaustion may also be considered within the context of the literature on women’s unique workplace challenges. Building and nurturing relationships are essential for career advancement. Women often face unique challenges in male-dominated industries, and strong networks can provide valuable support, mentorship, and access to opportunities. Although networking relationships are critical in every industry, they have been suggested to be even more important for women in the legal profession (Teja, 2021).

Additionally, the negative relationship between relational crafting and exhaustion should be considered in the context of China’s collectivist culture. The attorneys in this study may have been especially likely to reap the benefits of deepening work relationships, given that collectivist cultures value social support as a particularly desirable resource. Thus, less emotional exhaustion may have been perceived as a result of knowing that they have satisfied their need for social support in accordance with cultural norms.

Finally, our results revealed that the integrated thinking component of the Chinese indigenous cultural values of Zhongyong (Yang et al., 2014) enhanced the positive relationship between creativity and relational crafting and amplified the effect of relational crafting on the creative-work exhaustion relationship. Attorneys who excel in integrated thinking are more likely to interact with coworkers regarding their creative ideas. They are expected to seek, accept, and incorporate their colleagues’ suggestions in comparison to attorneys who are less skilled in integrated thinking. Accordingly, when attorneys practice integrated thinking and generate creative ideas, they are more likely to interact with colleagues to increase the probability of their ideas reaching fruition. Furthermore, they enjoyed the benefits of lower emotional exhaustion to a greater extent than those with low levels in the integrated thinking dimension of Zhongyong. Managers can hold training sessions to boost integrated thinking.

Limitations

This study has some limitations. First, we cannot rule out common method bias; however, our empirical tests suggest that this is unlikely to be a serious problem for these data. Future research should examine variables from multiple sources (e.g., employees and their supervisors or coworkers) and time periods. Second, our study focused on female attorneys in China; therefore, the study should be replicated in other countries, industries, and populations with greater gender diversity before drawing conclusions about generalizability. Finally, we chose to examine Zhongyong because of its relevance to the integrated thinking requirements of the occupations in our sample. Future research should examine other cultural values while considering the fit with occupations and research questions.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China project number 71974178, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities project number E2E40806X2, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) project number E2E58903A2, and a grant from MOE Social Science Laboratory of Digital Economic Forecasts and Policy Simulation at UCAS. We thank Zixi Ye for her assistance with the methodology and we thank Huijuan Ma for help with the data collection.

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