Employee overqualification and manager job insecurity: Implications for employee career outcomes

• Author: Lale Gumusluoglu,Zahide Karakitapoğlu‐Aygün,Talya N. Bauer,David E. Caughlin,Berrin Erdogan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22012
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Published date: 01 November 2020

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Employee overqualification and manager job insecurity:

Implications for employee career outcomes

Berrin Erdogan

1,2

| Zahide Karakitapo

glu-Aygün

3

| David E. Caughlin

1

|

Talya N. Bauer

1

| Lale Gumusluoglu

3

1

Portland State University, School of Business,

Portland, Oregon

2

University of Exeter Business School,

Exeter, UK

3

Bilkent University, Department of

Management, Ankara, Turkey

Correspondence

Berrin Erdogan, Portland State University,

School of Business, Portland, OR.

Email: berrine@pdx.edu

Abstract

In this study, we propose that manager job insecurity will moderate the nature of the

relationship between perceived overqualification and employee career-related out-

comes (career satisfaction, promotability ratings, and voluntary turnover). We tested

our hypotheses using a sample of 124 employees and 54 managers working in a large

holding company in Ankara, Turkey, collected across five time periods. The results

suggested that average perceived overqualification was more strongly, and nega-

tively, related to career satisfaction of employees when managers reported higher

job insecurity. Furthermore, employee perceived overqualification was positively

related to voluntary turnover when manager job insecurity was high. No direct or

moderated effects were found for promotability ratings. Implications for over-

qualification and job insecurity literatures were discussed.

KEYWORDS

career satisfaction, career success, job insecurity, perceived overqualification, promotability

ratings, turnover

1|INTRODUCTION

Employee overqualification describes an employment situation where

an employee's skills, education, experience, and other qualifications

exceed established job requirements (Johnson & Johnson, 2000).

Such a mismatch between worker qualifications and job demands is

increasingly common around the world. For example, according to

one estimate, 43% of college graduates in the United States held jobs

that did not require their degrees (Rose, 2017). According to statistics

from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

(OECD), in developing economies such as Cyprus, Peru, Romania, and

Turkey, these figures are even higher (OECD, 2019). As a case in

point, in Turkey, 29% of the labor force is estimated to be over-

educated for their jobs, with another 36% holding jobs that are sub-

stantially different from their field of formal education, potentially

resulting in feelings of perceived overqualification.

In the management literature, perceived overqualification and its

implications for employee attitudes and behaviors have attracted

increasing research interest in the past decade (Erdogan, Bauer, &

Karaeminogullari, 2017). To date, studies have shown that perceived

overqualification is related to negative outcomes such as less positive

job attitudes and well-being (Harari, Manapragada, & Viswesvaran,

2017), higher levels of career stress (Maynard, Brondolo, Connelly, &

Sauer, 2015), and greater likelihood of leaving one's job (Erdogan &

Bauer, 2009). At the same time, there is a growing stream of evidence

suggesting that overqualified individuals may make positive contribu-

tions to the organization under the right conditions in the form of

performance (Deng et al., 2018; Erdogan & Bauer, 2009; Fine &

Nevo, 2008), and creativity (Luksyte & Spitzmueller, 2016). The

emerging picture of employees who perceive themselves to be over-

qualified is that despite their potential value to organizations, their

effectiveness and career prospects are often thwarted. Thus, in the

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.22012

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2020 The Authors. Human Resource Management Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Hum Resour Manage. 2020;59:555–567. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm 555