Job crafting towards strengths and interests: how overqualification enhances creativity?

Personal motives are important to job crafting. Drawing on the job demands-resources theory, a two-pathway model of how overqualified employees manage the misfit between their capabilities and job requirements is proposed. Specifically, two novel job crafting strategies that can spur employees' creativity are identified: job crafting towards strengths (JC-strengths) and job crafting towards interests (JC-interests). The different boundary effects of empowering leadership on the relationship between perceived overqualification and JC-strengths and JC-interests are investigated. Using data from 507 employees of Chinese firms, perceived overqualification was found to be positively related to JC-strengths and JC-interests; both JC-strengths and JC-interests were positively related to creativity; and empowering leadership moderated the direct effect of perceived overqualification on JC-strengths and its indirect effect on creativity, while the moderating effect was nonsignificant for the relationship linking perceived overqualification to JC-interests. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.