Leaders' response to employee overqualification: An explanation of the curvilinear moderated relationship

Abstract

This research aimed to advance overqualification literature by examining how leaders’ perceived employee overqualification influences their empowering behavior and employee work behaviors. Drawing upon the individualized leadership theory, we proposed that leaders’ perceived employee overqualification has an inverted U-shape relationship with their empowering behavior such that leaders are more motivated to empower employees from low to moderate levels of overqualification, but this tendency decreases after a certain inflection point. We also predicted that the inflection point occurs at a lower level of employee overqualification when leaders perceive higher (vs. lower) status threat. Leader empowering behavior was hypothesized to positively predict employees’ voice and negatively predict their withdrawal behavior. Two multi-source and time-lagged studies were conducted to examine this moderated mediation curvilinear model. In Study 1, survey data from 372 leader–employee dyads supported the inverted U-shape mediation model from leaders’ perceived overqualification to empowering behavior, then to employee outcomes (i.e., voice and withdrawal behavior). In Study 2, we collected data from a sample of 73 team leaders and 286 employees, and the results supported the full model. Taken together, these findings offer a perspective to enrich the understanding employee overqualification and have important practical implications.