Tall Trees Catch much Wind? Investigating the Role of Supervisor Perceived Status Threat in Linking Employee Overqualification to Supervisor Undermining

Overqualified employees are prevalent in today’s organizations. While previous research suggests that supervisors may not often appreciate employee overqualification, how they may respond to the overqualification of their subordinates unethically has unfortunately been overlooked in organizational research. Drawing on social rank theory, we propose that supervisors may perceive a threat to their status from their overqualified subordinates, leading to supervisor undermining as an unethical response. We further hypothesize that the interpersonal personality traits of subordinates—extroversion and agreeableness—moderate the indirect relationship. We conducted a multi-wave, multisource survey study among supervisor-subordinate dyads (Study 1) and two vignette-based experiments (Studies 2A and 2B) to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, our results show that the positive indirect effect of subordinate overqualification on supervisor undermining through supervisor perceived status threat is weaker when subordinates exhibit low (vs. high) extraversion. Studies 2A and 2B largely replicate the above findings with strengthening the internal validity of our theorization. The implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.