You think you are big fish in a small pond? Perceived overqualification, goal orientations, and proactivity at work

Overqualification denotes situations in which job incumbents have higher qualifications than those required for the job. Drawing on the self-regulatory perspective, we proposed that employees’ perception of overqualification positively affects their proactive behavior through the mechanism of role-breadth self-efficacy and that this indirect effect is moderated by employees’ goal orientations. We tested our hypotheses through two studies. In Study 1, we found that perceived overqualification had a positive indirect effect on employees’ proactive behavior through role-breadth self-efficacy using a sample of 323 salespeople with a cross-lagged panel design. In Study 2, the multi-wave and multi-source data from 302 teachers confirmed the indirect effect and indicated that performance goal orientation and learning goal orientation moderated the indirect relationship.