Existing scholarly work exploring the drivers of positive job attitudes and workplace wellbeing shows that employees who can use fully their skills experience a sense of pride, engagement and accomplishment. However, recessionary economic conditions and the rising number of graduates from post-secondary institutions in today’s socioeconomic environment have resulted in nearly one-quarter of employees being overqualified for their jobs. This trend of an ever-increasing incidence of employees’ educational qualifications exceeding job requirements is underscored by numerous studies documenting the undesirable workplace outcomes of overqualification. When employees feel that their skills exceed what is needed for their role, they experience stress, they are unhappy, and they are less committed to their employer.

Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that lessen the negative effects of overqualification on employees’ job attitudes and wellbeing. The aim of this study is to reexamine empirically the relationship between overqualification and employee job satisfaction. It is argued that overqualified employees report low satisfaction scores because they do not use their full range of abilities at work, thus not fulfilling their need for competence. However, it is argued that employees who lack meaning in the work domain often compensate for the distress that it causes by engaging in meaningful activities in other life domains. Often, in order to use their skills and to regain a sense of meaning, overqualified employees direct their energies toward unpaid work. As a result, they experience improvements in their job satisfaction. Thus, volunteering offers an avenue for attenuating the negative wellbeing consequences of overqualification. For the purpose of this study, volunteering is described as a self-initiated and pro-social behavior whereby the volunteer commits time and effort by responding to motives grounded in altruism. To test these hypotheses, the analysis uses data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). This study contributes to the overqualification literature by introducing volunteering as a new construct to describe the conditions under which the social cost of overqualification and its negative impact on employee wellbeing could be attenuated.