Managing Overqualified staff in the workplace

What do we mean by overqualification?

Overqualification (or underemployment) is the situation where individuals have surplus qualifications such as education, skills, knowledge, abilities and experience that exceed job requirements.

The term can be expressed in terms of:

• Objective Overqualification: Focused on education from the perspective of potential employers. 
• Subjective Overqualification: Focused on individual perception, a predictor of attitudes and behaviours. 

It has been said that overqualification leads to a number of adverse consequences such as disengagement with work, low job satisfaction, and turnover. However, is it all that bad?

Perceived Benefits of Over Qualification

In cases where employees have chosen jobs for which they are overqualified so that they can handle their non-work responsibilities and interests, overqualified employees may experience lower levels of work–family conflict. A high-level employee may want to leave behind a high-paying corporate job demanding 60- hour work weeks in favour of spending more time with family and friends and devoting more time to hobbies, which would result in lower levels of work–life conflict and higher satisfaction with life.

·                Moreover, individuals may take a job for which they are overqualified but still get a deep sense of satisfaction from it if the job fits with their values and interests. For example, individuals may be attracted to occupations such as teaching, selling medical equipment even when they are overqualified because working in these jobs would give individuals a sense of helping others, doing meaningful work, and performing a job that satisfies their sense of belonging. 

-      Thus a consideration of over qualification within the broader meaning of work for the individual— such as the values fit of the job and the organization, or whether the job is instrumental for achieving some non-work goals—may provide a better picture of whether over qualification will hamper or enhance productivity and morale and provide the individual with a sense of enjoyment.- In fact, García-Montalvo and Peir ´o (2008) pointed out that choosing a job for which one is overqualified is more frequent among Spanish young adults when they give a strong priority to a job with a permanent contract and a regular work schedule or when they have no geographic mobility.
        
        Being overqualified may have positive consequences when there are other, compensating factors that add to the desirability of the position and when the person makes a positive choice to take the position rather than doing so solely for reasons of extreme need or economic desperation.

What About Organizational Practices?

Although a number of questions remain about the positive and negative effects of over qualification, we provide some suggestions for organizational HR practices.

Recruitment and Selection

-Workers who bring additional skills to the job can provide increased opportunities for organizations, perhaps even a competitive advantage.-What may be most important is that both employees and employers go into this situation ‘‘with their eyes open’’ so it is clear what the employment conditions will be and what each party would gain from the employment situation. This avoids feelings of psychological contract violations and feelings of inequity on the part of workers, and helps employers recognize whether the additional qualifications and skills provided by an individual worker are actually relevant and beneficial to the organization. Furthermore, what the employer can and cannot provide to the overqualified individual as part of the employment relationship should be made clear up front.-In short, the more apparent the conditions of the over qualification relationship are at the time of hire, the better. Finally, although by necessity organizational decision makers rely more on objective measures of over qualification

-During the selection process, they should remember that such objective measures are different from subjective over qualification as perceived by the employee and that the latter may be most relevant to attitudes and behaviour.

Performance Management & Reward systems

-When taking on overqualified employees, organizations should be prepared to provide the additional opportunities and rewards for these workers to gain the greatest advantage from them. -Furthermore, because there are many factors that may mitigate the negative consequences of overqualification in the minds of workers (e.g., fulfilling work, facilitating family responsibilities), organizations should be aware of what overqualified individuals may gain from the employment relationship and support these to the extent possible. 

-Most important, organizations should follow through on any agreements made with overqualified individuals at the time of hiring.

Training and Development

-Keep them challenged and stimulated. One way to do this, which should also lead to a better utilization of the skills of overqualified workers, is to train them in areas that will help them to progress. For example, an overqualified job applicant may be hired for a low-level position with the purpose of grooming them for advanced management positions, but this benefit will only be realized if the organization can provide them with the necessary management training. In other words, an overqualified individual may still need training in other areas to be effective. 

-In addition, organizations may need to train managers and supervisors on how to recognize the potential value of overqualified job applicants and how to best use the skills of these over qualified individuals.

To Conclude..

-Over qualification is an issue that is salient to both employers and to employees, and through the years it has been assumed to negatively affect attitudes, performance, and turnover.However the empirical research on over qualification is not conclusive in this regard.

-In fact, although over qualification can clearly have serious, negative outcomes, we believe that there are times and circumstances when overqualified employees may provide a valuable resource to organizations, and certain over qualification situations may actually benefit workers.

-What we need at this point is a better understanding of what over qualification is, how to measure it, how it is perceived by different actors in the organizations, how it is experienced by different employees, and when it might actually be beneficial… In other words, how can individuals and organizations make the best out of a potentially bad situation?

A New Model of CSR for HR

As the global market changes, companies have the opportunity to capitalise and move with these changes by greater involvement of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which this article argues should be aligned as closely as possible with and as a key part of business strategy.

Businesses must play a part in creating healthy societies and create shared value rather than just try to maximize profit, in order to drive the economy, and many forward-thinking businesses seem to be trying to do just this – crucially led by HR.

Although reputation is a strong driver of CSR, so is the need to think strategically about “mega-trends” (which can be greatly innovative for new products and services), as well as improving trust and growing the business by finding commercially sustainable ways to fix problems. Social and business value must go hand-in-hand, as merely creating social value is not enough – there must be a higher purpose. According to James Watts, CSR is “not something you choose to do or not do”; it is an obligation of any big business to give back to the community.

One useful strategy to understand markets and address related challenges is to consult with and partner third sector experts in charities and volunteer organisations as a form of “immersive, experiential learning” – this helps to embed community involvement deeply into business strategy, and in return, the third sector partner gets strategy advice and help from the organisation.

HR can take responsibility for CSR by linking it to performance management, in order to make workforces think about CSR in everything that they do. One example is Anglian Water, who now refer to themselves as a “campaigning organisation” and aim to engage employees and customers in valuing their product. According to Phil Brown, head of people development: “we are asking people to think slightly differently, and that means managing them in a different way.”

This will require business leaders who have powerful, personal first-hand experience, and understand the importance of sustainability, market diversity and customer needs. This will enable the alignment and integration of CSR into the business strategy, as well as to make the business value obvious to all its stakeholders.

Ben Brown, responsibility manager at Sky: “If we can help address these issues, it makes society more resilient, which makes our business more resilient.”

Successful CSR that reaps business benefits does not always have to involve high costs – for example, volunteering and mentoring programs can be a good way to put learning into practice, and other forms of giving back help to deliver more to the community when the business is fully invested and is measuring benefits. The link between HR and CSR is slightly blurry at the moment, but it can be cost-effective, and deliver benefits to both – HR are increasingly interested in "stretching their people’s skills in the community”.

Additionally, CSR can be a useful competitive advantage when it comes to recruitment: 70% of Millennials surveyed by Deloitte in 2011 said that their decision to work at companies is affected by the companies’ commitment to the community.

Four key ingredients to achieve real shifts in mindset and new sustainable behaviours:

1.      First-hand experiential learning of today’s global and societal challenges is crucial.

2.      People need to realize and understand the business relevance of their experience in addition to the experience.

3.      Senior leadership must provide clear sponsorship and involvement.

4.      After the experience, active support must be provided once back in the organisation to make the mindset and behaviour more habitual. 

Embracing the Virtues of Virtual Teams

Dispersed teams can actually outperform groups that are in one location. To succeed, however, virtual collaboration must be managed in specific ways. In the past, managers used to co-locate team members because of the high levels of interdependencies that are inherent in group work. Recently, though, more and more companies are beginning to organize projects over distance, with teams increasingly consisting of people who are based in dispersed geographical locations, come from different cultural backgrounds, speak different languages and were raised in different countries with different value systems.

Over the past 10 years, various studies have investigated the differences in performance of co-located and dispersed teams, quietly assuming that members of the latter never meet in person and members of the former work together in the same office throughout a project. And as past research has repeatedly shown, even the smallest degrees of dispersion, such as working on different floors in the same building, can greatly affect the quality of collaboration. 

Such studies have found that virtual teams offer tremendous opportunities despite their greater managerial challenges. In fact, with the appropriate processes in place, dispersed teams can significantly outperform their co-located counterparts.

So here's what you need to know about the bright and dark sides of dispersion:

The teams level of dispersion is never fixed, it is flexible. Thus when making decisions, managers must take into account the various pros and cons of dispersion.

• Pros: Heterogeneous knowledge resources, Utilization of cost advantages, Access to diverse skills and experience, Knowledge about diverse markets.

• Cons: Language differences, Cultural incompatibilities, Difficulties establishing “common ground”, Fewer synchronous face-to-face interaction, and good teamwork more difficult to achieve.

Bear in mind that despite the cons above, dispersion potentially has substantial advantages:

• First, in order to accomplish increasingly complex activities such as research and development, companies (particularly larger ones like IBM, General Electric or SAP) tend to cluster their competencies in different centres of excellence, which are often scattered geographically although part of an international corporate network of operations. SAP, for instance, has its global headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, but has built up large R&D centres in India, China, Israel and the United States in order to reduce costs and leverage their global know-how in software engineering.
•  Within each of these competence centres, the depth of expertise tends to be very strong, while the diversity of functional backgrounds is relatively weak because of specialization. Managers can take advantage of this organizational structure by assembling employees from different locations in such networks to create a team that can optimally integrate the different pools of expertise to perform a particular task.
• Moreover, higher levels of structural and demographic diversity in dispersed teams can be highly beneficial. Structural diversity is a direct consequence of having team members from multiple locations associated with different business units and reporting to different managers. Such diversity can be highly valuable for teams, because it exposes members to heterogeneous sources of work experience, feedback and networking opportunities. In addition, virtual team members are often diverse in nationality. Although such diversity may complicate team dynamics, it can also enhance the overall problem-solving capacity of the group by bringing more vantage points to bear on a particular project.

The Do’s and Dont’s of managing dispersion

The following key lessons can help companies maximize the performance of their virtual teams:

1.      Don’t underestimate the significance of small distances

Research shows that performance is noticeably lower for teams with people located in the same building but on different floors when compared with teams where all members are on the same floor. Interestingly, teams with members in the same building but on different floors also performed worse than teams with greater degrees of dispersion, including those that had members spread across a city, country or even continent. In fact, the only teams that fared worse were the intercontinental teams, with a significantly higher level of inter-cultural diversity and temporal dispersion (spanning many time zones).

Explaining these results: Teams with members in the same building, albeit on different floors, do not usually consider themselves as being dispersed and, hence, may easily underestimate the barriers to collaboration deriving from, for instance, having to climb a flight of stairs to meet a team mate face to face. In contrast, groups that are dispersed across a country or continent are more aware of their situation and may make extra efforts to improve such vital processes as task-related communication and coordination. To prevent that from happening, companies such as Cisco Systems, BMW and Corning have designed their office layouts to maximize interpersonal interactions. At Cisco Systems Inc.’s sites in Germany, for example, only three people have their own individual offices. All of the other 850 employees work in an open-space maximising opportunity for interaction.

2.      Emphasise team work skills

Many companies make the mistake of staffing such teams primarily on the basis of people’s expertise and availability. Instead, managers must also consider social skills — a major prerequisite for good teamwork. It’s unrealistic to bring together individuals from different locations with the expectation that they will automatically know how to collaborate in a virtual environment. Groups with increasing levels of dispersion are also progressively more dependent on their level of teamwork, specifically, their ability to perform key processes such as mutual support, communication and coordination. In order for virtual teams to achieve their greater potential (and take advantage of their functional and structural diversity), members must first and foremost be able to establish a basis for the effective exchange of their varying capabilities — all of which requires teamwork-related skills as a critical ingredient. Otherwise, the virtual team could very likely perform worse than a co-located group.

3.      Promote self-leadership across the team
 

When a group is closely co-located, an individual leader can more easily detect any deficiencies in teamwork and address them with a hands-on managerial style. An interpersonal conflict, for example, might be resolved by talking in person with the different parties in an informal setting. Such an approach is largely non-existent in virtual teams. Geographic dispersion and cultural diversity make it difficult for any individual leader to ensure that the team is functioning effectively. Even though the advanced use of the latest information and communications technologies can help, time zone differences and cultural problems can’t be overcome. Members generally need to be aware of the difficulties of dispersed collaboration and find effective ways to overcome those obstacles on their own. This highlights the need for people to be more self-sufficient in how they manage their own work because the team leader is less in a position to help. Consequently, companies that are serious about virtual collaboration must target their HR efforts not only at designated team leaders but also at team members so that those individuals can develop the skills necessary to work in a virtual setting.

4.      Provide for face to face meetings

Particularly effective for initiating and maintaining key social processes that will encourage informal communication, team identification and cohesion. A project kick-off meeting, for example, can be used to bring everyone together in one location for several days so that people can develop a shared understanding of the task at hand and begin to identify with the team.

5.      Foster  a global culture

Accordingly, managers and team members need to recognize and frame their company as such, communicating the international nature of the organization’s operations and markets. Various human resource strategies can help foster that mind-set, including temporary staff assignments at foreign locations and inter-cultural training. Nestlé, General Electric, IBM and SAP — all known for the global reach of their business activities — provide good examples of how to actively foster a global employee mind-set. Managers at Nestlé S.A., for instance, are expected to move to another country every three or four years so that they can learn about the specifics of each of those markets and develop a global mind-set from their experiences. Such practices advance the development of diversity-friendly attitudes and the ability to work in different contexts, which in turn help employees cope with the challenges of distance when working on virtual teams.

Concluding Points

Virtual teams can outperform their co-located counterparts when they are set up and managed in the right way. A firm needs to ensure that the group has the necessary socio-emotional and task related processes in place. Only then can virtual teams effectively integrate dispersed knowledge to take advantage of their cultural and structural diversity, thereby avoiding some of the drawbacks of dispersion while reaping its benefits.

image sourced from: biz30.timedoctor.com