Perceived overqualification, empowering leadership, and role clarity: a three-way interaction effect on work engagement

Abstract

Organizational researchers have recently shown considerable interest in the study of inadequate employment, among which the most common form is overqualification. Perceived overqualification, referring to the feelings of having more knowledge, skills, abilities, and work experience than required for a job, has been studied as an increasingly important factor affecting employee attitudes and behaviours in workplace. Previous literature has shown mixed conclusions regarding the attitudinal and behavioural outcomes of perceived overqualification. While most of empirical studies have indicated that perceived overqualification is related to negative work outcomes, another line of research suggests that the this conclusion is overly simplistic and perceived overqualification may be potentially valuable to organization. This study presented a conceptual model from a theoretical perspective of work engagement to explore the potential contribution of perceived overqualification on employee work engagement. According to Kahn’s (1990) conceptualization of work engagement, three psychological conditions, namely, psychological availability, psychological meaningfulness, and psychological safety, emerge to promote personal engagement. In present study, I assume employees who feel overqualified have greater availability, being ready and prepared to engage. With a sense of possessing surplus qualifications beyond requirements of a job, they have more physical, emotional and psychological resources and feel capable of driving these resources into job task. Meanwhile, two critical conditions are combined to facilitate those who feel overqualified to continually maintain engagement. First, I propose that empowering leadership captures the psychological meaningfulness condition. Empowering leaders give subordinates autonomy to perform, resulting sense of ownership over the work. Thus, subordinates tend to feel worthwhile and valued with a sense of return on investments of the self in job. Therefore, subordinates should find more meaningfulness in work and exhibit higher engagement. Secondly, the present study hypothesizes that role clarity reflect the psychological safety condition. With clearly defined role, employees experience less ambiguity and feel situations are predictable, secure, and clear in terms of behavioural consequences, and thus they are more willing to fully engage in work roles. Summarily, this present study proposes a three way interaction relationship that under the conditions of empowering leadership and role clarity, perceived overqualification is positively associated with work engagement. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.