JOB CRAFTING: WHAT PROACTIVE BEHAVIOURS DID HEALTHCARE STAFF ADOPT TO DEAL WITH THE ROLE STRAIN GENERATED BY THE COVID CRISIS?

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the capacity of healthcare staff to manage the role strains that emerged during the Covid crisis. To achieve our goal, we undertook research involving 24 healthcare employees between November 2020 and March 2021. Our focus was the strategies they developed to cope with the role strains triggered by the Covid crisis in an industry already under pressure. The results highlight several adaptive strategies applied by healthcare employees, in particular to cope with their workload and with the ethical dilemmas generated by lockdown measures concerning users of medical and social institutions. From a theoretical perspective, our research contributes to the literature on role strain, highlighting the contribution made by job crafting. From an empirical perspective, we emphasize the role played by proactive behaviours in maintaining organization during the exceptional context of the Covid crisis. A limitation of our study is the fact that we consider job crafting in the context of changes imposed by the Covid crisis, rather than in normal times. We discuss the importance of proactive behaviours in health workers and provide guidelines for further research.