Public defence: Baptiste Marescaux

Baptiste Marescaux will defend his PhD degree in Management. The thesis deals with how employees think innovatively and reshape their jobs to satisfy their own inner needs and feel better at work.

18 Nov

Practical information

  • Date: 18 November 2025
  • Time: 08.00 - 13.00
  • Location: Hønefoss, Auditorium E-121 and Zoom
  • Download calendar file
  • Organizer: USN School of Business

    • Join digitally (Zoom)
    Password: 181125

    Program 

    Kl 08.00. Trial lecture: «What could be different routes to need satisfaction in organizations — for example, what can be done at the individual, organizational, and policy levels?»

    Kl 10.00. Public defence: «Needs Reshaping Work: The Conceptualisation, Operationalisation and Articulation of Work-Related Need Crafting»

    Assessment committee

    • First opponent: Associate Professor Gavin R. Slemp, University of Melbourne
    • Second opponent: Professor Christina Nerstad, BI Norwegian Business School
    • Administrator: Associate Professor Birgit Solem, USN School of Business, University of South-Eastern Norway

    Supervisors

    • Principal Supervisor:  Professor Anja Hagen Olafsen, USN School of Business, University of South-Eastern Norway
    • Co-supervisor: Researcher Miika Kujanpää, USN School of Business, University of South-Eastern Norway
Any questions?

Baptiste Marescaux is defending his thesis for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

The doctoral work has been carried out at the USN School of Business in the program Management.

You are invited to follow the trial lecture and the public defence.

Summary

The thesis showcases how employees change how they do their job and how they think about their job in ways that fulfil their own intrinsic needs and make them feel more interested in their job, more effective at what they do, and more connected to others in their job.

A first key finding of this thesis is that employees significantly benefit from making modifications to their job that follow their own intrinsic needs. Their engagement and well-being are improved, while their exhaustion is reduced.

A second key finding of this thesis is that managers have a key influence on employee’s intrinsic needs that is complementary to the employee’s own proactive changes. Employees doubly benefit from both carrying out their own improvements, and getting support from their managers.Bilde av Baptiste Marescaux

To reach those findings, this thesis builds the new concept of work-related need crafting, recentering the concept of job crafting on the three basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Through this new concept, the thesis explores how employees, following their own needs, develop and enact crafting strategies to modify tasks, reorganize their work, build relationships, and change their perspective on their work.

This exploration of work-related need crafting and its impact involved research with working population across Norway, France, UK & US, including interviews, building new measurement tools, and repeated data collections over several months.

This thesis thus contributes to research and practice in three significant ways:

  • A new conceptual framework that showcases how crafting at work can be centred on needs, and how crafting dynamically interplays with needs. This can help employees understand how to reshape and rethink their job in beneficial and sustainable ways.
  • A measurement scale that enables to measure quantitatively the extent to which employee enact a wide diversity of different crafting strategies. This can help researchers explore the impact of different forms of crafting.
  • An articulation between the benefits of employee crafting and that of manager support. This can help managers and employees understand where crafting matters most, and where managerial support works best.

Practical Implications

Needs matter to work smarter. Employees benefit from adapting their work to their own intrinsic needs, reshaping how they work, but also rethinking what their job is and what their job could be. Complementarily, managers can support employees in areas of their job that they cannot directly improve.