Either Serious Leisure or Job Crafting? Latent Profile Approach

Background: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, working remotely and other flexible work practices have been widely adopted at workplaces. While this means that workers have more freedom to organize their work and other areas of their lives, it can also mean increasingly blurry boundaries and growing tensions between time and effort dedicated to work versus the non-work domain. Two prominent approaches have focused on leisure activities either as compensating for the strain and lack of resources workers may experience at work or the positive spillover effects from leisure to the work domain. On the one hand, the compensation approach suggests that effort expenditure between work and leisure is an either/or process, whereby workers who invest effort in the leisure domain might at the same time withdraw effort from the work domain, and vice versa. On the other hand, the spillover process points towards a both/and process, whereby workers who have challenging and enjoyable leisure pursuits will be energized to pursue challenges and enjoyment also at work. The present study adopts the concept of serious leisure, which denotes a steady and systematic pursuit of a deeply enjoyable leisure activity, to explore different configurations for pursuing personally meaningful leisure and work (i.e., job crafting) as well as their antecedents and outcomes. The aim of the study is to shed light on the various ways workers may combine pursuit of meaning and enjoyment both at leisure and work and explore their predictors and implications for well-being. Method and results: Three-wave data from 494 full-time employees in the U.S. and latent profile analysis were used to identify three distinct profiles of serious leisure and job crafting. These included ‘Occasional crafters and leisurists' (54%) who reported engaging in both approach and avoidance crafting as well as in serious leisure to an equal and moderate degree; ‘Serious at leisure, avoidant at work' (27%) who reported more prominent serious leisure and avoidance crafting than approach crafting; and ‘Expanding both leisure and work' (19%), who reported engaging in serious leisure and approach crafting very often. Career plateau, work focus, and age predicted belonging to these profiles in different ways. The profiles also related differently to boredom at work and subjective well-being. Conclusion: Having personally meaningful and goal-oriented leisure pursuits does not automatically mean that people engage in similar activities at work by crafting their jobs, nor does it mean that taking leisure seriously manifests mainly in avoidance behaviors at work. Our results illuminate the various ways people combine serious leisure and job crafting behaviors and reasons, including potential tensions, for why they do so. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed in the presentation.