The risk with your most overqualified employee isn't that they're bored. It's that you never gave them anyone to teach.

You know the person. They've been with you for years, they're clearly capable of more than the job asks of them, and some part of you has quietly filed them under "flight risk" — the recruiter call you assume is coming, the exit you can't quite plan around. You manage them a little carefully, a little at arm's length, waiting for the other shoe.

A study in the September 21, 2026 issue of the Journal of Management makes the case that the reaction you're bracing for often isn't the one that shows up. The authors are Jia Yu (China State Shipbuilding Corporation Limited and Renmin University of China), Deshani B. Ganegoda (Melbourne Business School, The University of Melbourne), and Chao Ma (Xi'an Jiaotong University). Drawing on generativity theory — the older idea, not original to this paper, that people can be motivated by wanting to guide the generation behind them — they tested what happens when older employees come to see themselves as overqualified for their jobs.

The design is two field studies, not a lab experiment and not a single survey passed around once. Study 1 followed 261 older employees across three waves. Study 2 followed 274 matched pairs of employees and their own supervisors, also across three waves, so the reports of helping behavior weren't only coming from the person doing the helping. Across both, the authors tested whether perceived overqualification predicts a "generativity motive" — wanting to support and be needed by the next generation — which in turn predicts finding meaning in work for the sake of future employees, and actually helping them. They also tested a moderator: what they call "mature-age practices," meaning HR practices built around what older employees specifically need.

I want to be direct about how far I got into this one. The paper sits behind a SAGE paywall that returned a flat 403 to every attempt to read it, it isn't indexed on PubMed, and I found no PMC copy. Everything here comes from the structured abstract on Crossref — a real abstract, written by the authors, but still only the abstract. I have not seen the tables, the exact measures, or how the authors define "helping behavior" in operational terms.

"We argue that perceptions of overqualification in older employees are positively associated with a core generativity motive—that is, a desire to support and guide the next generation and be needed by them." — from the published abstract, Journal of Management

Here's why this sits differently on your desk than on an HR director's desk at a company many times larger. They can afford to treat an overqualified veteran as a retention statistic to manage — rotate them, give them a title, wait it out. You don't have the bench depth for that kind of hedging, and you probably don't have six layers of ladder to offer someone who's already past the rungs you have. So the instinct to brace for their exit is reasonable, but it's also the instinct that wastes exactly the motive this study describes. If the desire showing up in that person is to be needed by whoever comes after them, managing them at arm's length is the one move guaranteed not to use it.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: the abstract doesn't spell out what "mature-age practices" actually look like day to day — it stays at the level of "HR practices tailored to older employees' needs," and I haven't read far enough to know if the authors get more concrete than that. My own read, which is mine and not theirs, is that in a company like yours this isn't a program at all. It's a decision you make once, out loud, about one specific person and one specific junior hire, rather than a policy you'd need an HR department to administer.

One thing to do this week: name the person on your team most likely to be quietly overqualified — the one you've been managing around rather than managing. Then give them one explicit, specific charge: not "mentor when you get a chance," but responsibility for one named junior person's growth on one named thing, for this quarter, with you checking in on it directly. The study's claim is about a motive that's already there. Your job is just not to leave it with nowhere to go.

If succession is less a single event for you than a running question of who's actually ready to carry what — and whether you're using the people who already know the answer — the Leadership Profile is built to make that legible.