Overqualification Theory, Research, and Practice: Things That Matter
In our focal article, we contended that overqualified employees may present unique advantages to hiring organizations and that decisions regarding overqualified employees should be made considering the strengths as well as potential limitations of employing overqualified employees. In this response to commentaries on our original article, we identify distinctions researchers should pay attention to. Specifically, measurement of overqualification (whether objective or subjective measures are used), dimension of overqualification in question (overeducation, being overskilled, overintelligence, or overexperience), when and from whose perspective overqualification is assessed (before or after e…
Overqualified Employees: Making the Best of a Potentially Bad Situation for Individuals and Organizations
One of the “truisms” of personnel selection is that overqualified applicants are likely to be a poor fit and thus experience low job satisfaction and performance and higher turnover. Recently, the issue of overqualification has come to the forefront because of the economic downturn, especially in some European Union countries where unemployment rates are extremely high. However, empirical research on overqualification in the industrial–organizational/organizational behavior literature is limited. In this article, we argue that although there may be drawbacks to overqualification for both organizations and employees, overqualification may also provide a number of positive outcomes for worker…
The lagged influence of organizations' human resources practices on employees' career sustainability: The moderating role of age
Abstract Research has progressed in theoretically and conceptually defining career sustainability and its indicators. However, research is needed to understand the relationship between those indicators and the way individual and organizational factors contribute to it over time. We add to this literature by considering performance and wellbeing as indicators of sustainable careers. Specifically, we considered patterns in the relationship between performance and wellbeing, used as proxies for a sustainable career, and the effects of different human resource (HR) practices and age on career sustainability. Data came from two waves of 653 employees and their supervisors in 26 organizations in …
The role of age in the relationship between work social characteristics and job attitudes
Despite the amount of research on the link between work social characteristics and job attitudes, there is a lack of work on moderators of this relationship. In the present study, we examine the role of age as a moderating effect of this relationship using life-span development theory. The aim of this paper is to study the moderator effect of age in the relationship between two work social characteristics (interaction outside the organization and interdependence) and job attitudes (i.e., general job satisfaction and work engagement). Participants were 258 workers from private organizations. Data were collected at two time points (2 to 4 weeks between T 1 and T 2 ). Results showed that the r…