WCRC Analysis
A study published in Personnel Review on 26 October examines collaborative job crafting, the joint adjustment of work by a team. Arnold B. Bakker and colleagues analysed survey responses from 320 employees in 60 project teams at one consulting firm. They found associations between empowering leadership, organisational support, behaviours that energise the team and collaborative job crafting. Psychological safety also mattered within their model. The open-access paper is careful about what this establishes: the simultaneous measurements do not prove cause and effect.
WCRC reads the research as a useful reason to examine who can alter a shared workflow. Our proposed application is a small, bounded work-review exercise. It has not been tested by WCRC, and it should be assessed as a management proposal rather than a finding from the study.
Choose a piece of work people can examine
The review should begin with a task the team completes often enough to understand. A broad instruction to improve collaboration leaves too many questions open. Following one piece of work from request to completion gives the discussion a defined subject.
Take a hypothetical client request that moves from an account team to a delivery team and then through an approval. The group could lay out what each person receives, what they add and what the next person needs. If information is entered twice, the team can identify the reason before deciding whether either entry can be removed.
That reason may be sound. One record might support a control the team cannot change alone. Another might exist because a former process required it. The work review should distinguish these situations so that a complaint about duplication becomes a decision somebody can make.
Starting with a limited task also makes disagreement easier to handle. Colleagues can inspect the same example rather than argue about whose department generally creates delay.
Give the experiment a boundary
Permission to redesign work needs an explicit scope. The team should know what it can change directly and what requires approval elsewhere. A manager who invites ideas while retaining every decision can leave people uncertain about whether experimentation is genuinely welcome.
WCRC would ask the team to write a short test agreement. It would identify the step being changed, the person responsible and the condition that would cause the experiment to stop. Any customer, safety or financial control affected by the proposal should have its relevant owner involved before the test begins.
The group should also agree what it expects to learn. Removing an approval step, for instance, might reduce waiting while increasing the number of corrections needed later. Measuring both would give a more useful account than celebrating a shorter completion time alone.
These suggestions go beyond the survey’s findings. They are a proposed way to turn a discussion about autonomy into a specific change that can be reviewed and reversed.
Make it safe to report an unhelpful result
A team needs room to say that its own idea did not work. If every experiment has to be presented as a success, the review will lose the information needed to improve the process.
The manager’s response matters here. Asking what happened and what should change next makes correction part of the work. Searching for somebody to blame for a bounded, approved test would send a different message. That is the practical significance WCRC attaches to the paper’s attention to psychological safety, while recognising that its observational design cannot establish the effect of a particular management intervention.
The study’s single-firm setting is another important limit. It does not represent every workplace or demonstrate a universal productivity result. A method suitable for a consulting project may need substantial adjustment where work is tightly regulated or where one team’s change affects many others.
The next conversation should therefore stay close to the task. Which handoff changed? What evidence showed an improvement or a new problem? Who else was affected? A team that can answer those questions has a basis for deciding whether to keep the experiment. It also has a clearer account of what meaningful permission to improve work should involve.