Crafting job and leisure activities when you are overqualified

Protean career orientation (PCO) has been regarded as an emergent career attitude that challenges contemporary labor markets. This study integrates job and leisure crafting literature with PCO to explore its relationship with work/non-work outcomes (i.e., thriving at work, self-development behavior, and work–life balance). We examine whether job crafting toward strengths and interests (JC-SI) and leisure crafting mediate the link between PCO and work/non-work outcomes. We also investigate how overqualification might moderate this mediated relationship. Using a matched sample of 235 subordinates and their supervisors from travel agencies in Taipei, we used SEM and PROCESS to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that JC-SI mediated the relationships between PCO and two dependent variables (i.e., thriving at work and self-development behavior). Similarly, leisure crafting mediated the relationship between PCO and personal life enhancement of work. In addition, overqualification enhanced the effects of JC-SI on thriving at work and self-development behavior. This study takes the first step to draw on whole-life perspective to explain how and why PCO leads to work/nonwork outcomes through the dual paths of JC-SI and leisure crafting. Our findings also provide evidence that overqualification magnifies the beneficial effects of JC-SI.