“I” calling in group: How collaborative crafting and LMX augment team performance

Drawing on Lewin’s Field Theory, this article attempts to explicate the impact of living a calling on team performance via the mediation of collaborative crafting. In doing so, we examine the intricacies of leader-member exchange (LMX) as a boundary condition in these relationships. LMX has nuances in research, with follower outcomes considering individual attributes as predictors. Data collected through questionnaires (N = 198, teams = 49) from Pakistani manufacturing workers were used for analysis. We found that employees’ calling in work units augmented the whole team’s performance with the intervening role of the self-managing strategy of job crafting; moreover, LMX strengthened this relationship. Shifting from the individual paradigm to the team paradigm, we study the role of calling in shaping team performance. This study makes three significant and novel contributions: it extends calling research to the team level, identifies collaborative crafting as the mechanism linking individual calling to team performance, and establishes LMX as a boundary condition that strengthens this indirect effect. Together, these contributions move calling research beyond its previously individual-centric focus toward a team-level, boundary-conditioned account of how meaningful work translates into collective performance.