Research On Influencing Mechanism Of Perceived Overqualification On The New Generation Employees’ Creativity:A Moderated Mediation Model

Influenced by the popularization of higher education and the intensification of market competition,many highly educated and competent job seekers are forced to engage in jobs that do not match themselves.This phenomenon of labor mismatch is defined as "overqualification",and "perceived overqualification" is the subjective perception of individuals to this phenomenon.The field of scientific and technological innovation of enterprises has gradually become the "main battlefield" in the competition and game of great powers.Enterprises need to attract high-quality talents and stimulate the innovation vitality of employees to maintain the innovation power.The new generation of employees is becoming increasingly important in the workplace.Although they tend to have strong innovation initiative,they also perceive overqualification due to the lack of promotion channels and qualification accumulation in the work.Overqualification is not only a kind of redundant human capital to be developed,but also a kind of mismatch between people and the environment.This study would like to tackle the issue of how to restrain the negative effect of overqualification and promote the positive side of it,such as innovation and transformation potential of the human capital.It is found that in social interaction,employees have a tendency to obtain positive impression evaluation from others.When there is a gap between expectation and current situation,impression management motivation will be aroused,which will drive employees to establish positive image to bridge the gap.This mechanism is likely to be triggered by perceived overqualification employees in the process of social interaction,and the motivation of impression management may be the internal driving force for positive transformation of perceived overqualification employees and activation of employees’ creativity.In addition,the relationship between perceived overqualification employees and creativity is also affected by the differences in employees’ collectivism orientation.Therefore,based on the impression management theory,this study constructed a moderated mediation model to explore the influence mechanism of overqualification on employee creativity,namely,how the positive relationship between overqualification and the creativity of the new generation of employees is generated,and when it is strengthened or weakened.This study explores the mediating effect of impression management motive and the moderating effect of the collectivism orientation,by taking 301 employees samples for empirical analysis.The findings are:(1)Over-qualification perception can positively promote the generation of creativity of new generation employees;(2)Impression management motivation played a partial mediating role in the relationship between perceived overqualification and creativity of new generation employees;(3)Both the direct effect of perceived excess qualification on the creativity of the new generation of employees and the mediating effect of impression management motivation are positively moderated by employees’ collectivism orientation,and this positive regulation only exists significantly in employees with higher collectivism orientation.This study found that the positive effect of overqualification on employees’ creativity is the result of the joint action of cognitive influence mechanism and relationship influence mechanism.Employees can mobilize positive cognitive resources to adjust themselves through the cognitive influence mechanism,and can also interact with individual cognition through the relationship influence mechanism.This study tries to reveal the mechanism and boundary conditions between overqualification and the creativity of the new generation of employees,enriches the research results on the positive effects of overqualification and provides a reference for organizations to manage the new generation of overqualified employees.