Employees increasingly experience changing work demands and must try adapting to them (Richter et al.
2020). One strategy to maintain work capability is using IWL, as it directly supports coping with current work tasks (Decius
2020). Our findings show a positive overall relationship between new work characteristics and IWL, indicating that there are benefits of new work characteristics. This supports the COR rationale (Hobfoll et al.
2018) and the argumentation of Demerouti (
2022) that new work characteristics may be a resource to be invested in order to receive IWL (and possibly resulting increases in competence) as a resource gain. This also matches the premise that work design contributes to employees’ learning and learning outcomes, stated in models as the work design growth model (Parker
2017), the presage, process, and product (3-P) model of workplace learning (Tynjälä
2013), or—more specifically for IWL—the antecedents, processes, and outcomes (APO) model of IWL (Decius et al.
2021). It also empirically supports the assumption that IWL fits well to the changing nature of work (Kortsch et al.
2021; Gerards et al.
2020; Noe et al.
2014). However, due to the cross-sectional design in our study, we can only assume that new work characteristics lead to IWL, and not vice versa. Although our reasoning suggests that new work characteristics precede IWL, we cannot exclude that this relationship could also be reversed. Employees who seek more learning opportunities may also find ways to incorporate new work characteristics in their workplaces. Also, the assumed mechanisms according to COR theory, such as the resource gain principle and resource caravans (Hobfoll et al.
2018) can only be tested with longitudinal study designs. Future studies thus could shed more light on how new work characteristics unfold their potential influence on IWL. For instance, new work characteristics may come with stronger learning demands (Kubicek et al.
2015), that may mediate the relationship to IWL. Additionally, alternative explanations such as job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton
2001; Zhang and Parker
2019) could explain the potential reciprocal relationship between work demands and IWL (Decius et al.
2023d; De Lange et al.
2010). Based on our reasoning, we would also expect that new work characteristics act as an antecedent to other learning approaches and hope to inspire future research for other learning approaches, such as formal learning and self-regulated learning, as well.
However, the overall new work characteristics-IWL relationship seems to be driven by the relationship between relevance of work and IWL in particular. Our findings add that new work might not be best investigated as a unified concept, but separately for the different new work characteristics. It especially highlights the role of employees’ motivation, driven by work design including the perceived relevance of their work, for their efforts to learn and develop (see Deci and Ryan
2002; Parker
2017). According to relative importance analysis, digitalization and flexibility were less important than the other new work characteristics and appear theoretically and practically less relevant. Given the central role of relevance of work, we call for more research on the specific mechanism of how relevance of work could trigger IWL. Furthermore, some new work characteristics may also work as job demands rather than resources. Although we found a positive relationship between dissolution of boundaries and IWL in our study, others found a positive relationship with presenteeism, suggesting that it could also act as a demand (Poethke et al.
2023). Investigating new work characteristics individually, rather than in an overall concept, may help to better understand differential associations with work-related outcomes.
Interestingly, learning climate did not influence the positive relationship between new work characteristics and IWL. We conclude that the identified new work characteristics-IWL link is robust against whether or not learning is facilitated and appreciated, or errors are welcomed or not as learning opportunities. According to our results, the organizational environment does not appear as a powerful source to strengthen the link between new work characteristics and IWL. The robustness of this relationship implies that it may not be easy for organizations to handle the effects of new work characteristics for employees. Indeed, IWL is hard or even impossible to control for organizations (Cerasoli et al.
2018) and our findings indicate that this is also true for implicit means, such as learning climate. We need more studies to better understand why and when new work characteristics are related to IWL, given that there seems to be a positive and robust relationship. However, in line with previous research on learning support and IWL (Crans et al.
2021; Decius et al.
2021; Hilkenmeier et al.
2021), we found a direct effect of learning climate on IWL, supporting the assumption that employees with more resources will acquire new resources more efficiently (Nikolova et al.
2016).
We relied on employees’ self-ratings only, which may raise methodological concern regarding common method bias (Podsakoff et al.
2012). Given that we identified a positive relationship between new work characteristics and IWL, we suggest that future studies utilize longitudinal designs and add supervisor ratings or observations to replicate our findings. However, employees’ perceptions of their workplace in terms of learning opportunities also vary widely, even when conditions are inherently the same (Coetzer
2007), so self-assessments are likely to remain an important component of IWL research.