Underused skills lead to lost drive? The impact of employees’ perceived overqualification on work

Abstract:  At present, given the continuous expansion of higher education and increasing competition in the job market, workers are increasingly choosing to engage in jobs below their actual capabilities, resulting in a sense of qualification surplus, which has received widespread attention from researchers. Previous studies on the impact of perceived overqualification on employees’ work passion have reported inconsistent results, and the influence of perceived overqualification on employees’ harmonious work passion and obsessive work passion has not yet been clarified. In this study, which was based on self-concept theory, a nonlinear theoretical model with two-stage moderation had been constructed to explore the mechanism underlying the impact of employees’ perceived overqualification on their work passion and the relevant boundary conditions, alongside the effect of work passion on job performance.
Through a questionnaire survey, research data were collected from a large state-owned bank in Southwest China. The questionnaire was drawn or adapted from mature questionnaires. We distributed surveys to frontline employees and their direct supervisors at 253 bank branches, and data collection involved 4 time points separated by 3-week intervals. Through a rigorous four-phase matching process, we excluded samples with missing data, resulting in 856 paired leader–employee data points across the four time points. Since the data in this study were nested, multilevel regression modeling was used to capture the within-level effects and between-level effects simultaneously.
The findings are as follows: (1) An inverted U-shaped relationship was observed between perceived overqualification and perceived relative job advantage. (2) Perceived justice of performance evaluation negatively moderated the curvilinear relationship between perceived overqualification and perceived relative job advantage, such that at high levels of perceived justice of performance evaluation, the nonlinear relationship between perceived overqualification and perceived relative job advantage became more attenuated. (3) Perceived relative job advantage was positively correlated with both employees’ harmonious passion and obsessive passion; (4) A nonlinear mediated moderating effect was observed, such that the interaction effect of employees’ perceived overqualification and perceived justice of performance evaluation indirectly affected both harmonious and obsessive passion via perceived relative job advantage; (5) Leaders’ enhancement of work meaningfulness positively moderated the relationship between perceived relative job advantage and work passion. Finally, (6) harmonious passion was positively correlated with employees’ in-role and extra-role performance.
This study makes the following contributions. First, it innovatively explores the nonlinear relationship between perceived overqualification and employees’ work passion, thereby resolving the inconsistencies in previous research on this potential relationship. Second, it proposes a mechanism to explain how perceived overqualification affects work passion based on self-concept theory, thus helping scholars clarify the influence of perceived overqualification from a theoretical perspective and expanding the scope of self-concept theory. Third, it enriches the boundary conditions associated with the impact of perceived overqualification on employees’ work passion and clarifies the impacts of task and social feedback according to self-concept theory. The conclusions of this study also have practical significance for companies seeking to motivate overqualified employees and respond to the national goal of high-quality and full employment.