The Relationship Between Perceived Overqualification and Psychological Ownership Through Self Regulatory Job Crafting Framework: An Experimental Study and Moderating Effects of Abusive Supervision and Mastery Climate

When employees experience lower levels of psychological ownership – that is feeling like ‘this job is mine’ (Pierce et al., 2001) – they tend to leave their organisations, posing a serious issue as voluntary turnover is costly for both employees and organisations. People who are overqualified due to their qualifications exceeding the requirements of their position may experience a loss of psychological ownership. However, in some situations, individuals might be inspired to use their surplus abilities at work and cultivate a psychological sense of ownership over their job. In this research, I propose lower levels of psychological ownership may be due to a mismatch between employees’ qualifications and job’s requirements, a phenomenon known as perceived overqualification, defined as when one has more skills, abilities, and knowledge than required for one’s job (Luksyte et al., 2022). My research project aims to examine how and when overqualified employees either focus on achieving person-job fit or avoiding intensification of their perceived misfit, which in turn will shape promotion and prevention psychological ownership. Integrating insights from the self-regulatory framework, I argue perceived overqualification shapes psychological ownership through two different types of job crafting. On the one hand, promotion job crafting involves expanding one’s job’s aspects. On the other hand, prevention job crafting entails diminishing the aspects of job. Furthermore, I examine the individual, team, and organisational contextual factors as potential moderators in the relationship between perceived overqualification and different forms of job crafting. I examine challenge and hindrance appraisals, abusive supervision and mastery climate as factors that could shape overqualified employees’ intentions to either achieve desired fit through promotion job crafting or assuage undesired misfit through prevention job crafting. Intended study will employ an experimental design to examine abusive supervision as a moderator shaping how overqualified employees engage in self-regulatory job crafting. Accordingly, this research aims to investigate the role of certain workplace situational factors that drive employees who perceive themselves possessing qualifications, skills and work experience more than required for their current job to either enhance or diminish the scope and complexity of their tasks, their skills, capabilities and expertise, professional relationships, and perceptions of their job as a whole in their organisations, ultimately leading them to either experience a higher sense of confidence to succeed on job, job as part on own identity, a sense of belongingness and responsibility for the job related actions and outcomes, or otherwise a controlled possession over job preventing others’ access to their job related resources such as knowledge, ideas, information, documents and files.