Perceived Overqualification And Cyberloafing:A Moderated Mediation Model Of Future Work Self Salience And Psychological Contract Breach

Perceived overqualification refers to the extent to which employees feel that their qualifications(e.g.education,skills and work experiences)exceed formal job requirements.With the development of higher education in China,The number of college graduates also hit a new high,with 9.09 million college graduates in 2020.When more and more college graduates enter the workplace and prepare to show their skills in the workplace,they find that their abilities exceed the requirements of the job,and they cannot fully realize their value,and then they will feel overqualification.The phenomenon of perceived overqualification is becoming more and more common in the workplace.At the same time,the research on perceived overqualification in the field of organizational behavior has also become more concerned.To date,the antecedents and consequences of perceived overqualification,as well as its mediators and moderators have been extensively studied.However,there are few discussions on the behaviors of employees with over-qualification from the theory of self-regulation and psychological contract.Based on this,this article proposes a moderated mediation model on the basis of extensive review of relevant literature,and uses situational simulation experiments and questionnaire survey methods to test the model.It is hoped that this research can enrich the research of overqualification.The research on the sense of excess has promoted our understanding of the mechanism of overqualification on the influence of cyberloafing behavior,and provided some suggestions for enterprises in management practice.Specifically,this research has done the following:First,by consulting the existing literature,the research theoretical framework is proposed.Before confirming this research,a large number of existing documents were consulted,and the theoretical basis,research methods and future prospects in the literature were carefully sorted and summarized.Then,on this basis,a moderated mediation model was constructed: the employee’s sense of surplus qualifications will make them feel that the psychological contract is broken,which will trigger the employee’s cyberloafing,and the future work self salience will play a moderator in it.Second,empirical researches had been conducted to test the moderated mediation model.In Study 1 and 2,we adopted the method of situational simulation experiment to collect data.By simulating the situations of high/low overqualification and high/low future work self salience,the aim is to explore whether overqualification will cause different behavioral responses under different levels of future work self salience.In Study3,we used questionnaire surveys to analyze the collected 208 valid questionnaires,aiming to verify the experimental results of Study 1&2 and further test the moderated mediation model.The data analysis results support the research hypothesis of this article:(1)Perceived overqualification has the positive effect on cyberloafing.(2)Psychological contract breach mediates the positive link between perceived overqualification and cyberloafing.(3)Future work self salience moderates the relationship between perceived overqualification and psychological contract breach,such that the positive relationship is weaker when future work self salience is high than when future work self salience is low.(4)future work self salience moderates the indirect effect of perceived overqualification on cyberloafing through psychological contract breach,such that the indirect effect is weaker when future work self salience is high than when future work self salience is low.Finally,through the analysis and discussion of the research results,this article further elaborates the theoretical and practical contributions of this article,and puts forward suggestions and future prospects for the limitations of the research.