The University of Houston Department of Psychology has come out with a recent study surveying the effects of overqualified workers in the workplace.
With the unemployment rate at an all-time high, the jobless are often taking any work that comes available to them, sometimes causing overqualified employees to work in unchallenging positions.
Alexandra Luksyte, a third-year student in the Industrial Organizational Psychology graduate program conducted the study. She surveyed 215 full-time student employees in a wide range of occupations and their employers to find how overqualified workers reacted to their under qualified positions.
“We found that overqualified people are usually the least productive in the workforce,” Luksyte said. “They engage in counterproductive work-behaviors, such as surfing the Internet or talking to their co-workers. They do anything besides their work because they are bored and feel underutilized.”
The study reflected that these employees participate in these behaviors because they become burned-out and tend to take a cynical point of view towards their occupations.
“We hypothesized this would happen and it makes sense, if you are overqualified and doing something boring, to feel as if you are wasting your time. If there is no room for professional growth, you might become detached from your job or your employers,” Luksyte said.
Luksyte’s findings also illustrate that employees tend to become cynical because no one forced them to accept the job for which they are overqualified. Employees become stuck in a position that they put themselves into even though they never had to accept the job in the first place.
Although these employees feel a sense of cynicism, those who are overqualified do produce good quality work, according to their supervisors, but they do not go above and beyond their expectations, Luksyte said.
For more than two years, Luksyte has been retrieving data for this study in order to be one of the first people to look into this topic and hopes to publish her findings in a psychology-related journal.
“Surprisingly, nothing has ever been done like this before, and I wanted to fill a gap in the literature and investigate further,” Luksyte said.
Luksyte and her academic advisor, Christiane Spitzmüller, associate professor of psychology, are preparing a manuscript for publication to be printed in a respective journal.
Luksyte and Spitzmüller are also collaborating to write a chapter for an upcoming book by Douglas Maynard, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz in New York and creator of the validated measures for over-qualifications Luksyte used while conducting the survey.
With two years left in her graduate program, Luksyte hopes to further develop her findings and replicate the study on a broader spectrum.
Luksyte has already looked into other aspects of being overqualified, including the idea that if the employee feels a connection with the company or their coworkers, they will be more likely to stay in the position they are in, even if they are overqualified for the position.
“I hope to expand upon this study in my dissertation and apply my finding to other topics in the workplace,” Luksyte said.
In a recent press release, Spitzmüller said that these finding would benefit many companies in the future.
“Organizations need to be aware of the risks associated with hiring overqualified job candidates,” Spitzmüller said. “With unemployment rates remaining high, companies now have access to very talented and experienced professionals who need jobs. Sometimes, however, hiring these people comes at a cost.”
