Job Crafting and Employee Engagement Among Millennials in Retail

Millennials, born between 1981 and 2000 (Dimock, 2019; Howe and Strauss, 2000), are rapidly becoming the largest demographic in the professional workforce. In Hong Kong's retail industry, which constitutes 5% of the city’s GDP and serves as an economic pillar, there is a critical need to understand the factors shaping the engagement and motivation of Millennial frontline retail employees. This research adopted a qualitative multiple-case approach, exploring the interrelationship between job crafting and employee engagement within this demographic group in the retail sector. The research employed a constructivist-interpretivist approach, emphasising the active role of participants in co-creating meaning. This study involved 24 semi-structured interviews drawn from three sports retail companies across Hong Kong, providing distinctive insights into the work experiences of Millennials. Guided by Social Exchange and Self Determination theories, this research applied thematic analysis to unveil the intricacies of Millennials’ job crafting behaviours and organisational factors that fuelled employee engagement in the Hong Kong retail environment. The findings revealed that Millennial frontline staff engaged more actively in their organisations when they experienced a workplace culture that fostered trust and care, encouraged team cohesion, promoted positive leadership, granted job autonomy, imbued their roles with meaning, and implemented caring human resource management (HRM) practices as the broader context shaping workplace experiences. The autonomy in task crafting, team relationships in relational crafting, and role meaningfulness in cognitive crafting operated as integral components of job crafting. These attributes collectively established a foundation that created workplace engagement among Millennials. This study broadens the understanding of job crafting and employee engagement within a non-Western context and highlights the need to adapt these concepts to this context. It also suggests that leaders, managers, and HR practitioners in the Hong Kong retail industry should formulate customised employee engagement strategies for Millennial retail staff.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

dba

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Chow, Teresa Sau Kuen

• HD28 Rheoli. Rheoli Diwydiannol

Dc Identifier Grantnumber

UWTSD

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.uwtsd.ac.uk:4134