Challengers, not followers? The effect of leaders' perceptions of team overqualification on leaders' empowering behavior
Journal of Managerial Psychology
ISSN: 0268-3946
Article publication date: 29 March 2024
Issue publication date: 6 June 2024
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
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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