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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Personality and Social Psychology

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1632774

Pipe up or Clam up: The Double-edged Sword Effect of Perceived Overqualification on Employee Voice Behavior

Provisionally accepted
  • Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Existing studies on the relationship between perceived overqualification and voice behavior do not reach a consensus. Drawing on the job demands-resources model, this paper explored the doubleedged sword effect of perceived overqualification on voice behavior and its boundary condition. We test our hypotheses based on data collected from 430 employees across a 3-wave study. The results demonstrate that perceived overqualification is negatively associated with employees' voice behavior through emotional exhaustion. Conversely, it is also positively associated with voice behavior via self-efficacy. Employees' careerism orientation careerism orientation moderates the relationship between perceived overqualification and self-efficacy, such that the effect is stronger when employees have high levels of careerism orientation.

Keywords: perceived overqualification, Voice behavior, Emotional exhaustion, self-efficacy, JD-R model

Received: 21 May 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Xiang, Xiang, Luo and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Nuo Chen, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China

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