Overeducation and Gender: Newcomer’s Growth of Social Network and Performance

Description

Gender stereotype literature has extensively shown that women are often associated with lower status and low competence that impairs their performance evaluation and ultimately career advancement. The increasing availability of quality tertiary education has made it possible for women to acquire additional education to signal their capability and obtain jobs, but it is unclear whether their overeducation serves as an asset or liability for their performance afterwards. In the meanwhile, existing overqualification literature offers limited understanding about the role of gender in the overeducation and performance relationship in several ways. First, existing studies mainly focus on human capital (motivation perspective and ability perspective) rather than social capital (relational perspective) which would be different for men and women. Second, even though researchers suggest that the effect of overeducation may vary between genders, previous research have only explored its effect during job application stage. However, the moderation effect of gender has not been tested after recruitment, such as socialization process. Third, existing cross-sectional and time-lagged designs cannot capture the dynamic characteristics in socialization, which demands a longitudinal change approach.
In this study, we explore the moderating role of gender on the relationship between overeducation and performance in the newcomer socialization context where social capital is essential for performance improvement. We integrate status inconsistency theory and social capital perspective to derive hypotheses. Specifically, we propose that overeducation will negatively relate to the growth of newcomers’ collaboration network indegree centrality and in turn the growth of performance, while the negative effect is more significant for men than for women.

Period	14 Jun 2023 → 18 Jun 2023
Event title	International Association of Chinese Management Research
Event type	Conference
Location	Hong Kong, ChinaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International