MeCoach: Crafting as a salutogenic way of life

Crafting is a concept from occupational and positive psychology that refers to the individual strategies to ‘craft’ one’s work and private life. Three areas of crafting have been identified in the literature: i) job crafting, ii) off-job crafting or leisure crafting, and iii) work-life balance crafting. Job crafting is a proactive employee-initiated behaviour to design or redesign the work characteristics and increase employee’s resources. Job crafting is associated with well-being, work engagement and other positive health and job-related outcomes, such as work performance and low levels of burnout. Complementary to job crafting is off-job crafting which refers to a proactive behaviour to adjust one’s off-job time activities to satisfy one’s psychological needs. Finally, work-life balance crafting refers to the proactive, self-initiated and goal-oriented behaviour, applying physical, relational and psychological techniques in the domains of work and private life to attain a self-determined work-life balance. My research focuses on the concept of crafting as a salutogenic way of life that promotes job and overall life satisfaction. The goal is to analyse and identify the various positive effects that crafting can have on people’s life. The overarching goal is the development of a digital intervention that would support people in active crafting of their job and off-job time and the balance between the two domains.

Keywords: Occupational health, crafting, digital intervention, positive psychology

Short Biography

I was born in Prague, Czech Republic, where I completed my Master’s in Clinical Psychology at Charles University in 2017. I received several Erasmus+ scholarships during and after my studies, which allowed me to spend a fare amount of my studies abroad. After my studies, I worked as a researcher at the University of Bologna, where I gained knowledge and experience in Occupational Health Psychology, in particular, in the development of interventions to tackle work-related stress and mental health problems at work. I started my PhD at the University in Zürich in February 2020 and my research focuses on the salutogenic aspects of one’s work and personal psychosocial environment. Also, I’m a big fan of Italian food!

Martin Tušl
Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute (EBPI)
University of Zurich

Personal Website
martin.tusl@uzh.ch

Supervisor: Georg Bauer