Industry leaders continue to lament the poor state of employee engagement, with some reports indicating that employees who are not engaged cost the world $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, which is 9% of the global GDP, and that even though American companies spend over $1 billion on employee engagement programs, they only provide is a short-term boost, and engagement eventually reverts to mean. Job crafting offers a promising method that can potentially drive sustainable and long-term improvement to employee engagement. Although originally conceptualized as actions initiated by employees to shape their jobs so as to derive more meaning from work, recent research has shown that job crafting interventions can be an effective tool for organizations and managers can enable job crafting among employees. However, no research exists on the effectiveness of job crafting interventions among knowledge workers, specifically Indian knowledge workers, who now form a significant part of the global workforce.

A job crafting intervention was designed and delivered to knowledge workers, employed with Indian multi-national organizations, to assess the extent to which such interventions can enable job crafting behavior, that translates into work engagement. An important aspect of the study is the use of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to understand and explain how job crafting behavior leads to enhanced work engagement, which is another gap in research – lack of theoretical rigor that explains why job crafting leads to work engagement. A quasi-experimental research design with no control group was used to deliver four interventions, and all the results provided support for the effectiveness of job crafting interventions in stimulating job crafting behavior, and consequently, work engagement. However, the ability of need satisfaction under SDT to explain how job crafting leads to work engagement was limited, and requires further research.