Jing Jiang, Huijuan Dong, Yanan Dong, Yuan Yuan and Xingyong Tu
Although employee overqualification is a common occurrence in the workplace, most research has focused on overqualification at the individual level rather than at the team level…
Abstract
Purpose
Although employee overqualification is a common occurrence in the workplace, most research has focused on overqualification at the individual level rather than at the team level. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study aimed to uncover how leaders' perception of team overqualification influenced their cognition and follow-up behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
We performed two studies to test our model. In Study 1, we conducted an experiment to examine the causal relationship between leaders' perception of team overqualification and leadership self-efficacy. In Study 2, a two-wave field study was conducted to test the overall model based on a sample obtained from a steel company in China.
Findings
We found that leaders' perception of team overqualification reduced leadership self-efficacy, which in turn hindered leaders' empowering behavior. In addition, leaders' social face consciousness strengthened the negative relationship between leaders' perception of team overqualification and leadership self-efficacy, such that the relationship was more negative when leaders' social face consciousness was high rather than low.
Originality/value
Our study contributes to the literature on employee overqualification and its effects on leaders through investigation at the team level to show how leaders respond to overqualified teams.