Overeducation in socialization context : a longitudinal study from status inconsistency theory

Abstract

Although organizations increasingly hire overqualified employees, the relationship between overqualification and performance remains puzzling. In this study, I examine how overqualification affects employees' development of social capital and performance in the context of newcomer socialization. Drawing on the theory of status inconsistency, I propose a longitudinal growth moderated mediation model linking overeducation, one type of overqualification, to the growth of performance via the growth collaboration network indegree centrality. Besides, gender is proposed to moderate the mediation effect. Specifically, I propose that overeducation is a high-status characteristic that stands in contrast to the newcomer condition, which is a low-status characteristic. This inconsistent status would cause coworkers' ambiguity. In turn, the ambiguity would increase unpredictability for collaboration. Thus, coworkers may choose to isolate the overeducated newcomers. Accordingly, compared to non-overeducated newcomers, overeducated newcomers would grow slower on collaboration indegree centrality, which in turn would have a detrimental effect on the growth of performance. Furthermore, men, as another high-status attribute, would amplify the negative effect of overeducation on performance growth via collaboration network indegree centrality growth. Most hypotheses are supported by an archival data set in a real estate agency chain in China, in which I traced the first five months of 2,766 newcomers who joined before the outbreak of Covid-19 (from May 2018 to June 2019) or after the outbreak of Covid-19 (from January 2020 to December 2020). I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research.