Employees who feel overqualified view more work tasks as unreasonable

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Employers typically seek out well-qualified candidates, but a new study by researchers in the Penn State School of Hospitality Management highlights the potential risks associated with workers who feel overqualified for their jobs. When employees saw themselves as overqualified, they were more likely to consider some of their workload to be unfair or worthless, the researchers said.

In a study available online now and slated for publication in the October issue of the International Journal of Hospitality Management, the researchers demonstrated that when hospitality employees felt overqualified, they were more likely to perceive assigned tasks as inappropriate for them. Furthermore, when employees viewed tasks as unreasonable — unfair to them as an individual, as opposed to perceiving the task to be a general waste of time — they were more likely to behave poorly at work and want to leave their jobs. However, the researchers found that being treated with respect by one’s manager reduced workers’ perceptions of tasks as unreasonable.

“Perception is what matters,” said Yoko M. Negoro, lead author of the study who earned her doctorate in hospitality management from Penn State in May. “If you feel like you are being asked to do something that is beneath you, it can degrade your attitude and performance at work. So, in this study we focused on how people felt, rather than trying to reach any objective measure of what constituted a legitimate task.”

The risk of feeling overqualified

In the hospitality industry, employees often need to be flexible and fill a wide variety of roles to satisfy customers, the researchers said. Additionally, other research groups have demonstrated employees who do not perceive their tasks as necessary or reasonable engage in negative behaviors. So, the researchers on this study wanted to understand what leads to perceptions that tasks are not valid and what companies can do to help their employees value their work.

First, the researchers recruited 109 participants online in the United States and United Kingdom who were students or worked in a variety of fields. Participants were presented with a scenario where they were a hotel desk agent with either six years of supervisory experience and a master’s degree or one year of experience and a high school diploma.

Then, participants were asked to rate whether various tasks — including standing in the lobby even when no guests are present and entering reports from old software by hand into a new system — were reasonable for the employee based on their assigned qualifications. Results showed that when people were assigned the higher level of education and experience, they were more likely to rate tasks as being unworthy of their time.

“When there is a mismatch between a person’s self-image as an employee and what they are asked to do at work, it can threaten that self-image,” said Michael Tews, Walter J. Conti Faculty Fellow in the Penn State School of Hospitality Management, Negoro’s graduate adviser and co-author of this study. “In order to avoid feeling less successful or less valuable, people often respond by mentally rejecting the task. It is a normal way to protect your ego if you are put in a position that makes you feel powerless or devalued.”

Unreasonable or unnecessary?

Once the scenario-based experiment confirmed their hypothesis about overqualification and task illegitimacy, the researchers recruited 225 employees from 46 chain restaurants in Beijing, China, to verify their results in a real-world setting. Participants answered questions about overqualification, illegitimate tasks, their intention to leave their job, misbehavior at work and respect from their manager.

According to the researchers, previous scholarship across many fields has demonstrated that people in East Asian countries typically hold a collectivist mentality — where individuals prioritize the needs of their group, like their nation, employer or family — while people in Western countries have a more individualistic mentality — where people prioritize self-reliance and individual rights, desires and needs.

“We included people from both Western and Eastern nations to understand whether workers with different cultural backgrounds were affected differently by inappropriate tasks,” said Chandler Yu, associate professor of hospitality management and co-author of the paper. “We found that — across cultures — workers experience the same frustrations with tasks they deem illegitimate, and feeling overqualified increased these feelings.”

To help understand people’s objections to tasks, the researchers asked Chinese restaurant workers whether their normal work contained unreasonable or unnecessary tasks. If an employee deemed a task to be unreasonable, they did not believe they personally should have to do it. If an employee deemed a task to be unnecessary, they did not think the task should be completed at all.

Participants who felt overqualified were more likely to find tasks to be both unreasonable and unnecessary. While unnecessary tasks did not seem to elevate negative behavior at work, unreasonable tasks were linked both to people’s intention to quit their jobs and to negative behavior including tardiness, missing shifts, poor performance and completing personal tasks during work hours.

“We noticed a clear difference between the impact of perceived unreasonable tasks and perceived unnecessary tasks,” Yu said. “People seemed more willing to accept that jobs involved wasted time or inefficiency. When people were asked to do things they thought were unfair to them, however, it had a negative impact on their relationship with their job.”

The power of respect

The good news for employers, however, is that they can help guide employees’ perceptions, the researchers said. Results indicated that employees whose managers treated them with respect reported 28% fewer unreasonable tasks than those whose managers were not respectful.

“We investigated managers’ respect because businesses can change how managers treat employees,” Yu said. “Managers or other leaders can be trained to communicate why each task is important and to recognize employees’ contributions, especially on undesirable tasks. When this type of communication is common, employees feel more valued by their employer, which decreases their sense that tasks are unreasonable. This, in turn, could lead to a more productive workplace with better retention and happier employees.”

The researchers also suggested that businesses should regularly review processes with employee input to determine the necessity and validity of assigned tasks.

This research focused on the hospitality industry — which employs people of widely varying qualifications and deals with a high turnover rate — but the authors said the principles likely apply broadly in workplaces.

“I worked for 15 years in a hotel, and I can tell you — tasks arise all the time that easily could be seen as illegitimate, whether they are truly illegitimate or not,” Negoro said. “But I don’t think the hospitality industry is unique. People in all lines of work may feel overqualified or like they shouldn’t be asked to do certain things. A respectful manager can probably help reduce burnout and improve job satisfaction in most fields.”

Yanqiao Lei, doctoral student at Penn State, also contributed to this research.