FOWI's first PhD graduate

Fangfang Zhang is FOWI's first PhD graduate. She was supervised by Professor Sharon Parker and Professor Marylene Gagne and is a member of CTWD. Fangfang’s PhD project focused on job crafting, the self-initiated changes that employees make in their jobs to achieve a better person-job fit.

In her thesis entitled “Reorienting Job Crafting Research: Theoretical Clarification and Novel Investigations into Demands Crafting”, Fangfang aims to provide a theoretical clarification of job crafting construct and a better understanding of demands crafting. The thesis includes three articles. Article 1 presents a new hierarchical structure of job crafting, which enables the integration of job crafting types and studies from two different perspectives. Article 1 has been published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and been recognized as 10% most downloaded paper 2018-2019 on Wiley. Article 2 investigates how individuals’ cognitive appraisals affect their choices of demands crafting strategies. Article 3 reconciles inconsistent theoretical debates and research findings on decreasing hindering job demands. Q: How did you feel about doing a PhD at FOWI? A: It was a great experience to do a PhD at FOWI. Doing a PhD is challenging and sometimes stressful, but I feel very lucky to have the amazing support from my wonderful supervisors, colleagues, and fellow students. I enjoyed the formal/informal seminars, discussions at FOWI, through which I could learn more about all interesting projects at FOWI. Although my PhD is only just a very small piece of all the projects at FOWI, I had a lot of meaningfulness working on my PhD as our work not only contribute to academic research but also the wider communities.