Self-efficacy and job crafting enhance performance and managerial effectiveness: results from a study of public managers in India

Managers proactively reshape the characteristics and boundaries of their jobs to attain better job performance and effectiveness. They make continual informal adjustments to the task, cognitive and relational elements of their jobs within formal job design constraints. Perceptions of self-efficacy influence such self-determined job crafting initiatives that help garner personal and contextual job resources, enable effective handling of job challenges, and enhance job performance and managerial effectiveness. Though there have been empirical studies establishing the relationships between self-efficacy and performance, and self-efficacy and managerial effectiveness mediated by factors like work engagement, there appear to be no published studies that examined the mediating role of job crafting in the selfefficacy-managerial effectiveness relationship. Using cross-sectional survey data (N=209) and structural equation modelling, this study explored the mediating role of job crafting in the relationship between perceived self-efficacy and in-role job performance as well as managerial effectiveness. The sample population included junior and middlelevel public managers in administrative and technical roles in a government organisation in India. The study findings demonstrated that job crafting mediated, though partially, respondents’ perceived self-efficacy and in-role performance as well as managerial effectiveness rated by their peers. The study findings add to the existing empirical literature explaining different facets of job crafting, job demands-resources and self-determined behaviours at work. Practical implications regarding management development initiatives, especially for a public organisation in India, were discussed.