Job Crafting

What job crafting is

Job crafting is a change that the holder of a job makes themselves to the boundaries of their work: the tasks they perform, the people they deal with, and how they understand what they do. The change starts from below, not from a management decision handed down to them.

Job crafting can happen in any organisation, whether the organisation acknowledges it or not. An employee who spends more of their time on the part of the job they do well, and less on the part they find heavy going, has crafted their job even if they never call it that. So the practical question is not whether to allow it, but where commendable initiative ends and a change to the agreed work begins.

Whether job crafting raises performance is a separate question. We found no published measurement settling it for the Saudi market, and so we base no recommendation on it.

The three forms of job crafting

• Task crafting. A change in the number, scope or method of the tasks performed: the employee adds a task nobody asked of them, widens an existing one, or performs it with a tool other than the usual one.
• Relational crafting. A change in whom the employee deals with, and how closely: they build a link with a department that the workflow does not call for, or reduce contact that used to exist.
• Cognitive crafting. A change in how the employee understands their work: from “I enter data” to “I make sure the figures a decision rests on are correct”. Nothing changes in what is done; what changes is the motive behind it.

The third form does not touch the contract at all, but the first two can. That is why the three need to be separated before any judgement is made about them. An organisation that addresses them as one thing ends up responding to what needs no response and leaving alone what does.

Job crafting and the statutory limit, which runs in both directions

Article 60 of the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) provides that a worker may not be assigned work that is materially different from the agreed work without their written consent, except in cases of necessity arising from exceptional circumstances, and then for no more than 30 days a year.

On its face, Article 60 of the Labor Law protects the worker against the employer, and it does. What it protects at its core, however, is what was agreed, and an agreement binds both parties. An employee who has crafted their work until it is materially different from what they contracted for is no longer performing the agreed work, even if what they now do is more useful. The text of Article 60 of the Labor Law does not address the employee, but the reference point it relies on, the agreed work, is the same in both cases.

Alongside it, the first item of Article 65 of the Labor Law requires the worker to perform the work according to the rules of the trade and the employer’s instructions, provided those instructions do not conflict with the contract, the Law or public decency, and provided carrying them out exposes no one to danger. The space in which an employee can move is bounded by the instructions, and the instructions are in turn bounded by the conditions that item sets out.

Together, Articles 60 and 65 of the Labor Law draw the line, but neither sets a standard for measuring a material difference, and we found nothing in our sources that sets one out. Without such a standard, the two provisions do not show at what point job crafting reaches that threshold. The definition of job crafting also does not decide what follows in a particular case where crafting has reached it.

Whether a job description forms part of what was agreed in a given contract is a question for that contract and for the document the organisation has adopted, not for the definition of job crafting. The particulars a Saudi employment contract must contain, among them the type of work and its location, are covered in our guide to employment contract requirements.

Why job crafting matters before it reaches the limit

Job crafting may never come near the statutory limit and still leave an effect that is easy to overlook: drift between the description and the reality. A job is described in a document written at a particular moment, while its holder reshapes it month after month. Two years on, what they do can be something other than what the document says.

The first thing this undermines is job analysis, because the analysis gathers information about a job whose description no longer matches it. After that, it undermines whatever has been built on the analysis.

Three places where drift from job crafting shows

The drift has signs that can appear years before anyone identifies it:

• The vacancy advertisement. When the job is advertised after its holder leaves, the organisation finds that the description on file does not attract anyone able to do what was actually being done. The description is rewritten in a hurry, which amounts to a late admission that it had been left unattended.
• The handover. Whoever succeeds a holder who crafted the job finds tasks whose origin and basis they do not know, because nobody asked for them and they were never written down anywhere. Some of them lapse without any decision, and the lapse comes to light only when the task is needed.
• The appraisal dispute. An employee measured against a description they no longer perform objects, but has nothing to prove what they do perform, and their manager has nothing to disprove it. The conversation turns on two impressions rather than on documented work.

All three are symptoms of a single cause: what happened was not recorded when it happened. Each of them can cost more than a question asked once a year would have cost.

The trap in job crafting: evaluation applies to the job, not to its holder

Job evaluation rests on an explicit principle: it measures the job regardless of who holds it. Job classification, one approach to job evaluation, assesses each job from its documented description. Job crafting is the case in which that principle collides with reality, because the holder is the one who changed the job.

Take an outstanding employee who has widened their role until they carry more responsibility than was written for them. If the job is evaluated again on what it has become, its grade rises, and it rises for whoever holds it next as well, someone who may do none of what their predecessor did. The organisation will then have raised the grade of the chair as a reward for what the person sitting in it did. If the job is not evaluated again, the employee goes on doing work above their grade with nothing in return, a situation that can end with their departure and with the organisation discovering that their successor does not do what they used to do.

The way out is not to side with one outcome over the other but to separate a change to the job from a contribution by the person. The question to ask first is: does the organisation want this widening to remain in the job after its holder leaves? If the answer is yes, it is a change to the job, to be documented, evaluated and announced. If the answer is no, it is a personal contribution, to be rewarded where individuals are rewarded and not on the job grading scale. The two can be confused because they arise from the same event.

Where job crafting has no room in the tasks

The room for job crafting is not the same in every kind of work. Where strict adherence to procedure is itself what keeps people safe, there is no room for crafting the tasks: an operating sequence on a hazardous site, the steps for handling a material, or a control procedure that separates the person who authorises from the person who executes. A holder who changes any of these of their own accord is not showing initiative, even if the change makes the work faster.

Even in this kind of work there remains room for relational and cognitive crafting, which do not touch the procedure. The rule, then, is neither to forbid job crafting in general nor to permit it in general, but to decide which of its three forms is open in this particular work. How much crafting should be permitted follows the nature of the work and its risks, and cannot be decided across the board. An organisation that tells its staff not to use their judgement says more than it means to, and one that says nothing leaves the line to each individual’s discretion.

What job crafting is not

• Job enrichment. A design that the organisation initiates, adding depth and responsibility to a job, whereas job crafting is initiated by the holder. The difference lies in the direction: enrichment is a decision that is announced and applied to whoever holds the job, while crafting is individual behaviour that the organisation may not even know about.
• Job autonomy. The room within which the holder can act; job crafting is what the holder does with that room. Autonomy is therefore a condition of crafting: a job with no autonomy can be crafted only by breaking its rules.
• An acting assignment. A temporary, announced allocation by the organisation of the tasks of another role, with a start and an end. Job crafting is gradual, can go unannounced, and has no fixed end.
• Internal mobility. A move to another existing job. In job crafting, the employee stays in the same job while its content changes.
• Job specialization. A decision about how work is divided between roles. Job crafting changes the content of one role from within, at the hands of the person who holds it.

The provisions relied on are those of the Saudi Labor Law as published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development: Article 60 (no assignment of materially different work without the worker’s written consent, with its exception for necessity) and Article 65 (the worker’s duty, in its first item, to perform the work according to the rules of the trade and the employer’s instructions, within the limits that item sets). Royal Decree M/44 of 1446H, in force since 19 February 2025, did not amend Article 60 or Article 65 of the Labor Law.

How an organisation can benefit from job crafting

The first step is to acknowledge that job crafting happens, because an organisation that assumes its employees do exactly what was written for them is working from a map that does not describe the ground. The next is to give it an open outlet: a channel through which an employee says what they changed and why, so that the information sits with the organisation instead of remaining with that employee alone.

The most useful place for that conversation is the periodic review of the job description, not the performance discussion. Mixing the two can make an employee afraid that what they changed will be taken as a shortfall in what was written for them, and so they stay silent about it.

Each change raised is then sorted into one of three groups: what is approved and fixed in the description because the organisation wants it to stay; what is stopped because it touches a procedure that must not be touched; and what is left without a decision because it concerns nobody but the employee. That third group should be left alone explicitly rather than through neglect, and the difference shows the first time someone asks what basis a task has.

Crafting that built up before any of this was in place is a separate matter. An organisation may discover the drift only years later, and settling what has accumulated is a question for each case on its facts, not something the definition of job crafting decides.

An organisation that never hears about job crafting may discover it on a single day: when the employee leaves.

This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Job Specialization
• Job Classification
• Performance Standards
• Succession Planning
• Peter Principle