Research On The Influencing Mechanism Of Leadership Overqualificatio

With the spread of higher education and the global economic downturn,overqualification is increasingly common and has become a popular social topic.Existing research on overqualification primarily focuses on the phenomenon of overqualification among front-line employees.The negative implications of employee overqualification are often explained through the use of relative deprivation theory,person-environment fit theory,and equity theory.Conversely,the positive impacts of overqualification are attributed to human capital theory and self-regulation theory.However,little is known about the phenomenon of leader overqualification and its implications.For organizations,understanding the effects of leader overqualification on followers and teams holds significant practical significance for talent management.On one hand,comprehending the impact of leader overqualification on the organization helps clarify the organization’s stance towards overqualified leaders and determine whether it needs and possesses the ability to accept such leaders.On the other hand,understanding the impact of leader overqualification assists organizations in effectively managing overqualified leaders,leveraging their advantages,and mitigating any potential negative effects they may bring.After reviewing previous research on overqualification,several shortcomings have been identified.Firstly,prior studies have predominantly focused on employee overqualification,neglecting other types of workers,particularly leader overqualification.Secondly,existing research has primarily examined the effects of overqualification on individuals’ work attitudes,behaviors,and well-being,while its impact on others remains understudied.However,leaders’ role and status expand the scope of overqualification’s effects,directly influencing leader behaviors and team outcomes.Thirdly,the multiple identities of leaders can result in varied effects of overqualification,presenting a double-edged sword effect that requires further exploration.Lastly,due to the limited research scope,the effects of overqualification on team outcomes have not been thoroughly investigated.In reality,the impact of leader overqualification on team outcomes may be more formal and direct,given the formal relationship between leaders and teams.Based on the existing research and identified research gaps,several research objectives are outlined below.The first objective of this study is to address the current research gap by focusing on the phenomenon of leader overqualification,which has received limited attention thus far.The second objective is to investigate the doubleedged sword effect of leader overqualification using the framework of self-concept,exploring both positive and negative outcomes associated with this phenomenon.The third objective aims to examine the impact of leader overqualification on team creativity,drawing from the social cognitive theory and creativity literature.Lastly,this research seeks to expand the understanding of the boundary conditions surrounding leader overqualification,providing practical implications for organizations.By accomplishing these research objectives,this study aims to contribute to the existing knowledge on leader overqualification and offer valuable insights for organizational practices.According to these research purposes,this research fills the research gaps through three sub-studies—study 1: A qualitative study on leader overqualification.By interviewing 27 leaders,this study clarified the phenomenon of leader overqualification and its implications.Study 2: The effect of leader overqualification on leader behaviors.Following the framework of self-concept,this study explored the impact of leader overqualification on leader mentoring and controlling behaviors via the different dimensions of self-concepts.This research conducted a multi-source and multi-wave field study to survey the nursing teams from several hospitals in China.Study 3: The effect of leader overqualification on team creativity.Based on social cognitive theory and the creativity literature,the third research examined the relationship between leader overqualification and team creativity via leader encouragement of creativity and team creative process engagement.Similar to Study 2,this multi-wave and multi-source study also surveyed the nursing teams from hospitals in China.In Study 1,it was found that there was no essential difference between leader overqualification and employee overqualification.Thus,leader overqualification can be measured using the well-established overqualification scale.As found in prior research,leader overqualification had both negative and positive impacts on leaders’ cognition.Additionally,leader overqualification had effects on their dominance motivation,motivation to lead,and prestige motivation.Moreover,leader overqualification had both impacts on leader mentoring and controlling behaviors.The former one was mediated by motivation to lead,and the latter one was mediated by dominance motivation.The final finding was that overqualification increased leaders’ requirements for team creativity,performance,and team cooperation.Study 2 demonstrates that leader overqualification was positively related to motivation to lead.Motivation to lead mediated the positive relationship between leader overqualification and leader mentoring behaviors,which was strengthened by performance expectation.Motivation to lead also mediated the negative relationship between leader overqualification and authoritarian leadership,and performance expectation moderated this indirect effect.Leader overqualification was positively related to psychological entitlement.Psychological entitlement mediated the impact of leader overqualification on authoritarian leadership(abusive supervision),and performance expectation weakened these indirect effects.In terms of personal identity pathway,this research revealed a positive association between leader overqualification and dominant identity,and dominant identity served as a mediator in the relationship between leader overqualification and authoritarian leadership.Study 3 revealed that leader overqualification was positively associated with leader encouragement of creativity.Leader encouragement of creativity served as a mediator in the relationship between leader overqualification and team creative process engagement.Furthermore,team creative process engagement acted as a mediator in the relationship between leader encouragement of creativity and team creativity.Both leader encouragement of creativity and team creative process engagement mediated the effect of leader overqualification on team creativity.Moreover,leader perceptions of team capability strengthened the positive impact of leader overqualification on team creativity through leader encouragement of creativity and team creative process engagement.Findings from Studies 1-3 provide new insights for the overqualification research.First,by focusing on the effects of leader overqualification,this research extends the research object of overqualification and offers new insights into the overqualification research.Second,this research deepens the understanding of the effects of overqualification by focusing on leader behaviors and team outcomes.Limited by research object,prior research has paid more attention to the effect of overqualification on personal attitudes and behaviors in the workplace.To our knowledge,the impact of overqualification on team outcomes is unexplored.This research broadens the outcomes of overqualification by exploring the effect of leader overqualification on leader mentoring behaviors,controlling behaviors,and team creativity.Third,this research examines the effect of leader overqualification on leader behaviors and team creativity from the framework of self-concept and social cognitive theory,which enriches the understanding of how leader overqualification influences leader behaviors and team creativity.Study 2 found that leader overqualification affected their selfconcept,and the impact on the different dimensions would trigger paradoxical leader behaviors.Accordingly,Study 2 provides new theoretical implications for the doubleedged sword of overqualification.At the same time,based on the social cognitive theory,study 3 found that overqualified leaders had a higher sense of self-efficacy,which increased their creativity expectations and demands for the team they supervise,prompted the team to engage in the creative process,and in turn increased team creativity.These findings open the “black box” of the team-level influence of overqualification.Finally,this research enriches the personal and contextual boundary conditions of the effects of overqualification.Performance expectation effectively distinguishes the self-efficacy and self-worth mechanisms of leader overqualification,which provides new insights into when overqualified leaders tend to mentor followers and when they tend to control their followers.Study 3 found that leader perceptions of team capability strengthened the indirect effect of leader overqualification on team creativity via leader encouragement of creativity and team creative process engagement.This finding expands the contextual boundary conditions of the effect of overqualification by focusing on the third-party moderators unrelated to leader support.That is,only when the overqualified leaders believe team capability fits their capabilities are they more likely to motivate team members to be creative,which in turn positively impacts team creativity.Despite the theoretical contributions and practical merits,there are also several limitations.First,the outcome variables in this study need further refinement.In Study2,we focused only on leader mentoring behaviors and controlling behaviors and did not measure other leader behaviors,such as laissez-faire leader behaviors.In Study 3,we focused only on team creativity instead of other team performance,e.g.,team task performance,and team organizational citizenship behaviors.Based on this,future studies could focus on the effects of leader overqualification on different leader behaviors and team performance.Second,the mediation mechanism in this study needs further improvement.In Study 2,although we used three dimensions of self-concept to explain the double-edged sword effect of leader overqualification,there is some overlap among these three dimensions,so future research can choose a more appropriate theoretical perspective.In addition,there may be limitations in the personal identity pathway.This study wanted to answer the question of who overqualified leaders want to be.The dominant identity measured in this study was adapted from the Dominance Motivation Scale without developing a new scale.Thus,whether this measure can fully reflect dominant identity requires further validation of future research.Third,this research did not have any control variables to enhance the robustness of our findings.In particular,Study 2 did not control the common mechanisms mentioned in previous studies,such as relative deprivation,justice,and emotions.Future research can further test the proposed hypotheses by controlling these variables.Given that the current research has not discussed the team-level effect of overqualification,Study 3 did not have any control variable based on the overqualification literature.However,the team creativity literature is relatively rich,and leader-related factors are important antecedents of team creativity.Accordingly,future research can examine the relationship between leader overqualification and team creativity by controlling some leadership styles and leader-member relationships.Finally,this research is also limited in the research sample.Both studies investigate the nursing team from Chinese hospitals.Although the multi-wave and multi-source studies verified the most proposed hypotheses,whether these findings can be used in other industries or cultures need more empirical evidence.Therefore,future research can recruit participants from different cultures and other initiatives to test the conceptual models.