The effect of overqualification on employee work outcomes

Overqualification is a dimension of underemployment that is defined as possessing more education, experience, and skills than the demands of present employment situation. Perceptions of possessing excessive qualification with respect to job requirements are associated with negative job attitudes in the overqualification literature due to feelings of relative deprivation experienced by employees. Relative deprivation theory (Crosby, 1976, 1984) suggests that when a person fails to meet the subjective standards that he/she feels entitled to, being deprived of these subjective standards result in frustration, which leads to poor job attitudes in the context of employment. Contemporary research on overqualification focus on identifying the conditions that inhibit the negative outcomes of overqualification (e.g., Erdogan & Bauer, 2009). In this study, we explore whether social exchange mechanisms in the work environment, namely leader-member exchange and organizational support, can moderate the negative relationship between overqualification and employee work attitudes, which are job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, and turnover intentions. A series of regression analyses were performed on a sample that consists mostly of highly educated service sector employees in Turkey. Results confirm the negative effect of perceived overqualification on work attitudes while providing no support for the hypothesized moderation effects of leader-member exchange and perceived organizational support. The theoretical implications of results were discussed and their implications for practice and future research were presented.