Research On The Influence Of Perceived Overqualification On Employees’ Knowledge Sharing Behavior

With the expansion of the popularity of higher education and the intensification of the competitive market situation,based on the pressure of employment,many highly educated people have to lower their initial high career expectations and choose to work in jobs that are below their own qualification level.Coupled with the impact of the epidemic,jobs have been greatly reduced,leading to an increasingly complex and severe labor market.As a result,“Overqualification” has become a widespread phenomenon in China today.In view of this,scholars have begun to focus on the impact of perceived overqualification on workplace-related behaviors of employees.The main focus is on the negative effects of perceived overqualification on employees’ turnover,cyberloafing,and counterproductivity,which are detrimental to organizational development.However,as research on it has intensified,scholars have found that perceived overqualification has a potentially positive impact on employees and that effective management can bring benefits to organizations.Therefore,how to take effective human resource measures to manage overqualified employees and fully utilize their human capital and potential is a key issue that scholars and managers need to address urgently.In the knowledge economy,employees’ knowledge sharing behaviors can help companies apply and innovate knowledge and gain sustainable competitive advantage in the fickle market.For perceived overqualified employees,redundant qualifications give them the natural conditions in which they can implement knowledge sharing behaviors.Yet the lack of motivation may inhibit employees from adopting this altruistic,prosocial behavior within the organization.The study points out that pro-social motivation,as an intrinsic driver of prosocial behavior,effectively drives employees to share knowledge within the organization.Based on this,this study focuses on the relationship between the influence of perceived overqualification on employees’ knowledge sharing behavior from a positive perspective and examines the role of pro-social motivation in the process of its influence.In addition,the era of knowledge economy makes the team become the basic structural unit of the organization,the roles and tasks of individuals are embedded in the team,team members are closely interdependent,and task interdependence becomes an important feature in the process of team development.Thus,the present study introduces task interdependence as a contextual factor as a moderating variable to investigate how it enhances or attenuates the positive effects of perceived overqualification.To address the above issues,this study selected working employees of enterprises as the respondents,obtained 271 samples for analysis through questionnaires,and used SPSS 22.0 and Mplus 8.3 statistical software to analyze the data to test the research hypotheses.The following main conclusions were eventually obtained:(1)Perceived overqualification positively affects employees’ knowledge sharing behavior.(2)Prosocial motivation plays a fully mediating role in the process of perceived overqualification influencing employees’ knowledge sharing behavior.(3)Task interdependence moderates the influence relationship between perceived overqualification and prosocial motivation,and further moderates the mediating effect of prosocial motivation,which is expressed as a moderating mediating role.Focusing on the positive effect of perceived overqualification,this study explores the process of perceived overqualification on employees’ knowledge sharing behavior and identifies boundary conditions that enhance the positive effect of perceived overqualification.This study provides an important addition to previous research on the translation of perceived overqualification into positive impact,as well as practical suggestions for organizations to manage this group of employees scientifically and thereby leverage their potential value.