The well-being of school principals is paramount, as they play a central role in school operations and education (Beausaert et al., 2023). According to Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), job characteristics (job demands and resources) and employees’ personal characteristics (personal resources) are key determinants of employees’ well-being. Within this framework, job crafting is proposed as an employee-driven job design approach, by which employees proactively seek an optimal equilibrium between job demands and job resources. Through strategies such as increasing structural or social resources, increasing challenging job demands, or decreasing hindering demands, employees can proactively redesign their jobs, potentially resulting in enhanced occupational well-being (Tims et al., 2013). Research has demonstrated that job crafting indeed changes job characteristics in the intended direction, ultimately leading to improved occupational well-being (Tims et al., 2013). However, less is known about how job crafting affects personal resources, and how it, in turn, influences occupational well-being. Drawing on JD-R theory and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll et al., 2018), this study argues that job crafting fosters the development of curiosity and resilience (Toyama et al., 2023), which, in turn, predicts positive changes in work-related well-being, such as work engagement, job satisfaction, and burnout, over time. Longitudinal data from 257 Finnish school principals collected at two time points one year apart (2022 and 2023) were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results showed that increasing challenging job demands was the only job crafting strategy significantly predicting an increase in curiosity and resilience. No job crafting strategies directly predicted change in work-related well-being. Instead, the change in resilience predicted an increase in work engagement and job satisfaction and a decrease in burnout, and the change in curiosity predicted an increase in work engagement and job satisfaction. Curiosity fully mediated the effect of increasing challenging job demands on a change in work engagement and job satisfaction. Resilience also fully mediated the effect of increasing challenging job demands on a change in work engagement and burnout yet failed to mediate the effect of the job crafting strategy on job satisfaction. These results highlight increasing challenging job demands as a central job crafting strategy in predicting positive changes in work-related well-being through the development of personal resources. Overall, this study advances our understanding of job crafting by providing new insights into the mechanisms by which job crafting affects work-related well-being through personal resources.

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