Job crafting towards strengths and job crafting towards interests in overqualified employees: Different outcomes and boundary effects

Abstract

In response to the call to investigate the positive side of overqualification, we drew on the job crafting perspective to theorize that overqualified employees can proactively regulate the discrepancies between their actual and ideal jobs via two different job crafting strategies: job crafting towards strengths (JC-strengths) and job crafting towards interests (JC-interests). We expected distinct positive outcomes for JCstrengths and JC-interests. Specifically, JC-strengths benefits both overqualified employees and the organization, whereas JC-interests only benefits the individual employees. We further proposed that the relationship between perceived overqualification and JC-strengths will be stronger when employees' organizational identification is higher, whereas the relationship between perceived overqualification and JC-interests will be stronger when their identification with the organization is lower.As expected, with the use of two-wave and dual-source data from 653 employees, we found that perceived overqualification was positively related to both JC-strengths and JC-interests; JC-strengths was positively related to both vitality and supervisorrated task performance, whereas JC-interests was only positively related to vitality.We also found that the relationship between perceived overqualification and JC-strengths was moderated by organizational identification as hypothesized.

Assessing job crafting competencies to predict tradeoffs between competing outcomes

“…Job crafting is idiosyncratic and people craft jobs differently according to their regulatory focus (Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2019); personality Plomp et al, 2016;Rudolph et al, 2017); self-evaluations, efficacy, and competence (Niessen, Wesseler, & Kostova, 2016;Rudolph et al, 2017;; perceptions of overqualification (Lin, Law, & Zhou, 2017;Zhang et al, 2021); needs and values (Niessen et al, 2016;Vogel, Rodell, & Lynch, 2016); fit (Lu, Wang, Lu, Wang, Lu, Du, & Bakker, 2014;Vogel et al, 2016); time perspectives (Kooij, Tims, & Akkermans, 2017); intensity (Dierdorff & Jensen, 2018;Mäkikangas, 2018); and adaptation to constraints (Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010). Interventions directed at job crafters' objectives have also related to increased job crafting, fit, well-being, and performance (Kooij, Tims, & Akkermans, 2017;Oprea, Barzin, Vîrg a, Iliescu, & Rusu, 2019;.…”

“…Second, we assess how job crafters' competency profiles relate to tradeoffs they make between performance and well-being. Workers craft their jobs to improve different outcomes (Kooij, van Woerkom, Wilkenloh, Dorenbosch, & Denissen, 2017;Tims et al, 2012Tims et al, , 2013Zhang, Wang, Qian, & Parker, 2021), and we expect that tradeoffs between optimizing performance and well-being will be involved in this process (Campion & Thayer, 1985;Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011;Harju, Kaltiainen, & Hakanen, in press;Morgeson & Campion, 2002;Schwartz et al, 2002).…”

Perceived Overqualification and Intensive Smartphone Use: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…The P-E fit theory posits that there are five types of P-E fit, in which person-job fit is particularly important for individuals, especially in the workplace (Kristof-Brown et al, 2005;Jansen and Kristof-Brown, 2006;van Vianen, 2018). For instance, perceived overqualification (POQ), a typical type of person-job misfit in organizations (Erdogan et al, 2020) and a global trending phenomenon (Hu et al, 2015;Li et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2021a), was proved from different theoretical perspectives that could rise many negative consequences in the workplace (Feldman, 1996;Harari et al, 2017), such as more counterproductive behavior (Liu et al, 2015;Schreurs et al, 2020), high turnover (Wu and Chi, 2020), less creative performance (Zhang et al, 2021b), and less proactive behavior (Luksyte et al, 2020). Furthermore, recent research has found that POQ leads to more cyberloafing in the organization (Cheng et al, 2020).…”

Examining Job Complexity on Job Crafting Within Conservation of Resources Theory: A Dual-Path Mediation Model

“…Therefore, highly complex jobs push employees to develop new strategies to craft their jobs so that they can acquire and conserve their valuable resources. Employees' proactivity to adapt to job requirements and craft their jobs is thus becoming more important than ever (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001;Tims and Bakker, 2010;Zhang et al, 2021). experience, whereas in avoidance crafting employees seek to withdraw from the job work roles (Bruning and Campion, 2018).…”