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Organizations often employ many employees with a wide selection of talents, experiences and expertise. These include individuals who may be overqualified – individuals who imagine they have talents and skills beyond what is needed or required for their job. For some of them, the presence of such employees is common estimates indicating that just about one third of the world’s workforce is considered to be overskilled. This trend is likely to proceed as aspects resembling education levels exceeding market demands, constant changes in skill requirements due to technological advances, and increasingly selective hiring practices result in people taking jobs that do not fully utilize their qualifications. In fact, we may be heading towards a way forward for mass reskilling.
In such realities, understanding the potential consequences of hiring overqualified employees is crucial for organizations, because their presence can increase or decrease productivity. While intuition suggests that having overskilled employees can be problematic, it can also create unique opportunities for each employees and their organizations. Research on this issue, while extensive and insightful, has sometimes produced inconsistent conclusions, which has complicated our understanding and made it difficult to develop effective strategies to address the problem.
In an effort to get a clearer picture of the consequences of worker overqualification, my colleagues and I conducted a meta-analysis (a study of research, if you’ll) to shed some light on the issue. We analyzed data from over 200 studies involving over 85,000 employees. The test was recently published in Management Journal. Here’s what our literature review suggests:
What matters is how they interpret their situation
What drives people to commit to doing their jobs effectively, helping co-workers when needed, and exercising restraint to prevent behavior that is detrimental to the organization’s success? Lots of explanations, but tests suggests that they often fall into one of three categories: having compelling motives, enthusiasm, and belief in one’s own abilities. In other words, people are likely to engage positively with their work if they have enough of it reason feel live and imagine them Power do the job.
This framework helps explain why our study found that overskilled employees can be either harmful or helpful to the corporations they work for.
On the one hand, our results suggest that some overqualified employees interpret their work situation negatively, focusing on what shortcomings or deficiencies there are in their work. Generally speaking, people want jobs that match their experience and education level. Failure to do so will, for comprehensible reasons, result in a sense of frustration and demotivation. They may blame their organization for not providing enough opportunities to match their skills, lack of interest in their tasks, or resent those they perceive as superior. These feelings can spill over into their work, affecting the way they view their work, perform tasks, and interact with others. This explains why in our study we found that overqualified employees may perform poorly and even engage in counterproductive behavior.
On the other hand, our results also suggest that overskilled employees can be an asset, especially if they interpret their situation positively. This signifies that while being perceived as overqualified can sometimes be frustrating and even disappointing, it nonetheless signals that the person is actually able to perform their tasks effectively and perform at a high level. When used, such trust can enable employees to develop effective coping strategies and regulate their behavior in productive ways. This explains why we also found that some overqualified employees perform at a high level, go the extra mile when mandatory, and avoid behaviors that will harm their organization.
This not only affects their productivity
How overskilled employees interpret their situation matters not only to their financial performance, but also to their very own psychological well-being. We have found that those employees who view their surplus skills as an asset tend to enjoy higher mental and physical health, in addition to greater overall job satisfaction. This gives employees an necessary insight: while feeling overqualified can be frustrating, how you interpret your situation plays a key role in your mental and physical health, which can enable more practical coping strategies that can put you in a higher position to ultimately improve situation.
As is often the case, culture is key
So how can you help your overskilled employees interpret their situation in a more productive way? One obvious way is to provide them with the opportunity to use their skills through difficult assignments, leadership training or promotion pathways.
In addition to these aspects, our study showed that culture matters. We looked specifically at national culture and found that employees from more collectivistic and flexible cultures tend to interpret their situations more positively, but that these findings can also be applied to organizational culture. In particular, cultivating a sense of belonging and fostering a mindset focused on learning and development can direct the attention of overskilled employees to the positive points of their situation, leading to higher job performance. Implementing such a culture takes time, but a good place to start is by opening each vertical (up the hierarchy) and horizontal (across departments) communication channels, offering mentoring programs, and providing opportunities for continuous learning and development.