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Challengers, not followers? The effect of leaders' perceptions of team overqualification on leaders' empowering behavior

Jing Jiang (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China)
Huijuan Dong (Department of Employment Relations and Human Resources, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia)
Yanan Dong (Beihang University, Beijing, China)
Yuan Yuan (School of Management, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China)
Xingyong Tu (Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China)

Journal of Managerial Psychology

ISSN: 0268-3946

Article publication date: 29 March 2024

Issue publication date: 6 June 2024

418

Abstract

Purpose

Although employee overqualification is a common occurrence in the workplace, most research has focused on overqualification at the individual level rather than at the team level. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study aimed to uncover how leaders' perception of team overqualification influenced their cognition and follow-up behavior.

Design/methodology/approach

We performed two studies to test our model. In Study 1, we conducted an experiment to examine the causal relationship between leaders' perception of team overqualification and leadership self-efficacy. In Study 2, a two-wave field study was conducted to test the overall model based on a sample obtained from a steel company in China.

Findings

We found that leaders' perception of team overqualification reduced leadership self-efficacy, which in turn hindered leaders' empowering behavior. In addition, leaders' social face consciousness strengthened the negative relationship between leaders' perception of team overqualification and leadership self-efficacy, such that the relationship was more negative when leaders' social face consciousness was high rather than low.

Originality/value

Our study contributes to the literature on employee overqualification and its effects on leaders through investigation at the team level to show how leaders respond to overqualified teams.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos: 72102009 and 71802008), the National Social Science Foundation of China (No: 18BGL149) and Post-doctoral Foundation of China (No: 2020M680305).

Citation

Jiang, J., Dong, H., Dong, Y., Yuan, Y. and Tu, X. (2024), "Challengers, not followers? The effect of leaders' perceptions of team overqualification on leaders' empowering behavior", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 39 No. 5, pp. 517-538. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-04-2022-0171

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

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