Colleagues' job crafting: How inspiration and anxiety relate to helping and undermining behaviour

Previous research on job crafting has predominantly focused on an ‘actors' perspective’, failing to comprehensively explore how job crafting relates to others within the work context. Drawing upon the appraisal theory of emotion, this study adopts an ‘others' perspective’ and proposes a dual pathway framework to illustrate both the negative and positive behavioural responses associated with coworker job crafting. We argue that coworker job crafting is associated with observer functional behavioural responses (i.e., more helping and less undermining) and dysfunctional behavioural responses (i.e., less helping and more undermining) through its associations with observer inspiration and anxiety. We also propose that construal level acts as an important boundary condition of these indirect relationships. Results from a three‐wave study and an experience sampling study indicated that inspiration mediated the relationship between coworker job crafting and both helping behaviour and social undermining, while anxiety only mediated the relationship between coworker job crafting and social undermining. Construal level further moderated the indirect relationship between coworker job crafting and social undermining via observer anxiety. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.