Job Crafting — Active Path to Flourishing

6.1 Wrzesniewski and Dutton's Model (2001)

Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton (2001, Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work) proposed that employees do not passively receive their jobs — they actively shape them. Job crafting is:

"The physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work."

Three types of job crafting:

1. Task crafting: Changing the type, scope, or number of job tasks (e.g., a patwari who voluntarily starts maintaining digitised records beyond her duty; a constable who organises community meetings)
2. Relational crafting: Changing the quality or amount of interactions at work (e.g., a revenue officer who builds stronger connections with village pradhan to ease land dispute resolution)
3. Cognitive crafting: Changing how one perceives the job — seeing it as a calling rather than just tasks (e.g., a MNREGA supervisor who sees daily attendance monitoring as "building rural employment security" not "filling registers")

6.2 Job Orientations — Calling, Career, Job (Wrzesniewski, 1997)

Wrzesniewski et al. (1997) found workers across occupations relate to work in three ways:

Orientation	Description	Predictor of
Job	Work for income; no other value	Higher absenteeism; lower satisfaction
Career	Work for advancement and status	Moderate engagement; dissatisfied if promotion blocked
Calling	Work as intrinsically meaningful; would do it even without pay	Highest flourishing, commitment, and performance

Hospital cleaners who saw their work as a calling (contributing to patient recovery) showed higher engagement than surgeons who saw surgery as merely a career. This applies directly to RAS: collectors who see administration as a calling show dramatically better governance outcomes than those focused only on promotion.

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