Employees with more skills than their jobs require have long been something of a puzzle for employers. They can be bored, frustrated and disengaged in roles that fail to stretch them, yet, given the right conditions, they can also be among an organization's strongest performers.

New research co-authored by Associate Professor Alex Luksyte of The University of Western Australia (UWA) Business School carries that question out of the office and into the home, asking whether being overqualified makes work and family life harder or easier to reconcile. The answer, it turns out, depends largely on which of the two an employee values more.

Published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management, the research drew on two studies of employees in Chinese banking and other industries, conducted with colleagues from Beihang University and Tsinghua University. Overqualified employees who valued work above family reported more anxiety about their career development, along with more strain-based work-family conflict, where they were too worn out to take part in family activities and responsibilities. Those who valued family above work reported less time-based conflict.

Luksyte, who has studied overqualification since her PhD, says the research started from two expectations that pointed in opposite directions.

"On the one hand, we thought that living with an overqualified partner could be really detrimental to family life, because overqualified people may bring their frustration, boredom and dissatisfaction to their family lives, and these negative attitudes can spill over," she said.

"But we also thought that one of the best predictors of work-family conflict is work overload. When people are exhausted at work, they bring that tiredness home. Interestingly, overqualified employees are unlikely to experience work overload, because they have more knowledge, skills and abilities than their jobs require. They can actually experience underload, which means that when they come home, they are not tired, and they may have time and energy for their family lives."

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