LAUSR

Abstract Chinese ‘new generation’ employees have a strong desire to make self-initiated changes in their jobs (that is to say, job crafting). However, whether such crafting is beneficial or detrimental to their organizations is an issue that remains largely unexplored. To address this question, we employed a ‘social exchange’ framework to build a more nuanced understanding of the boundary conditions favourable versus unfavourable consequences of Chinese new generation employees’ job crafting. Multisource data from 289 pairs of new generation employees and their immediate supervisors reveal a positive relationship between job crafting and leader–member exchange when employees have greater opportunities to participate in decision-making and a negative relationship when employees’ participation in decision-making is low. Via leader–member exchange, therefore, employee job crafting ultimately contributes to the promotion or decline of employees’ task performance, respectively. Our findings provide insights into how new generation employees and their organizations can benefit from their self-initiated changes at work, and these insights have important implications for Chinese new generation employee management.