PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1532083
Cracks in the JDR Framework? The Inefficacy of Strengths Use, Job Crafting, and Home-Work Spill Over in Balancing Job Characteristics, Work-Home Interference, and Wellbeing During COVID-19
Provisionally accepted
- 1Optentia, North West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa
- 2Department of Human Resource Management, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
- 3Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
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Introduction:The COVID-19 pandemic forced many organizations into remote working conditions which significantly disrupted employees' work and personal lives. Drawing from the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework, this study investigated the relationship between job characteristics, work-home interference, motivation, and psychological wellbeing during the COVID-19 lockdown. Furthermore, we investigate whether individual strategies such as strengths use, job crafting, and home-work regulatory factors moderate these relationships.Method: A cross-sectional survey study was conducted to sample 522 participants experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown. Structural equation modelling, mediation analyses, and moderation analyses were performed to test our hypothesis.Results:The results showed that work overload, organizational support, and job security were significantly related to negative and positive work-home interaction, while growth opportunities and advancement were not. Positive and negative work-home interference and motivation were directly related to psychological wellbeing, whereas only positive work-home interference showed a relationship to motivation. Further. the study only found support for strengths use and job crafting as moderators on the relationship between job security and negative work-home interaction. Finally, we found that positive/negative home-work spill over may not be helpful in explaining how job characteristics affect the work-home relationship.Discussion:Our findings raise critical questions regarding the JDR model’s universal applicability in unpredictable contexts: while structural factors like work overload, organizational support, and job security remain influential, the expected moderating effects of individual-level strategies (i.e., strengths use and job crafting) were limited. These results suggest that, in times of crisis, organizations should prioritize structural interventions over placing the onus on individuals to manage work-home interference.
Keywords: job demands, Job resources, Job crafting, Strengths use, Work-home interaction, psychological wellbeing, JDR approach
Received: 21 Nov 2024; Accepted: 15 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Van Zyl, Cornelisse, Le Blanc and Rothmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Llewellyn Ellardus Van Zyl, Optentia, North West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.