Influence Of Overqualiificatioin On Employee Job Crafting And Work Disengagement

Overqualification is defined as individual’possessing more education, experience, knowledge, skills or abilities than their job requires. It’s a phenomenon of individual demand-ability misfit, also a need-supply misfit. As the phenomenon of over-qualification in organizations becomes more and more common, it drives us to consider the influence of employees’ overqualification on work general. Namely, when employees are overqualification, what workplace behavior will they display workplace behavior? Why do they behave such behavior? What kind of overqualfication applicants the organization should recruit? Which organization interventions will buffer or promote the relationship between overqualification and its undesirable or desirable consequences?Review the past literature, most of the existing studies on overqualification focus on negative attitudes (job dissatisfaction, low organization commitment, high turnover intention) and explicit undesirable behaviors (counterproductive work behavior and actual turnover). Little research pays attention to relatively implicit behavior in most cases and potential positive behaviors that may happen on overqualification employees. About middle psychological mechanism between overqualification and explicit deviant behaviors, researchers have proposed job burnout and psychological contract may act as mediators, but these processes fail to accurately explain the underlying mechanism between overqualification and implicit behaviors or potential positive behaviors.Based on theoretical analysis above, this study introduces overqualification as antecedent variables, and study individual specific psychological process and its effect on final work behavior choice when faced with overqualification. As perception about work environment is an important predictive indicators of individual work behaviors. In this study, we based on fit theory to explain individual specific behaviors during overqualificaion situation, and introduce work alienation (Individuals perceived work need-supply misfit, namely, the work fails to meet the individual desires, values, expectations, and thus the individual perceive separation and distance from work, it’s a series of subjective and negative psychological experience about work) which closely associated with "fit" as mediators, to further explain the emergence of negative behavior and disappearance of positive behavior due to work alienation in overqualification situations. Individual-level psychological resilience has important influence on individual’s evaluation and adaptation of work environment, and group-level leadership factors are closely related to employee work perceptions. Therefore, we use resilience and transformational leadership as moderators to analysis the moderating effects of it on overqualification and work alienation.The author adopted questionnaire survey on employees from various industries and companies, and finally collects342pieces of valid questionnaires. Then the author used SPSS and LISREL software to analyze questionnaire data and test the research hypotheses. The main conclusions of this study are:(1) Overqualification has significant influence on both positive and negative work behavior. Specifically, overqualification is positive related with work disengagement and negative related with job crafting;(2) Overqualification has significantly positive influence on employee work alienation;(3) The relationship between individual overqualification and work disengagement and job crafting behavior;(4) Psychological resilience act as a moderator to influence the relationship between overqualification and work alienation, but the moderating effect of transformational leadership on overqualification and work alienation has not been verified.Based on the fit theory, this study explored individual’misfit perception due to their need cannot be supplied in overqualification situation, and found work alienation can effectively explain internal impact mechanism of overqualification on individual behavior. This research has an important referent value for both theoretical and practical implications. Finally, the limitations of this study and future research directions are also mentioned.