Self- and Supervisory Perspectives on Age and Work Attitudes and Performance

Abstract

Person- and context-oriented definitions of age were used to predict three sets of work outcomes: work attitudes, performance ratings, and reports of developmental practices. The five age measures included employee chronological age, employee subjective age (i.e., self-perceptions of age), and social age (i.e., others' perceptions of age), as well as self- and supervisors' perceptions of the employee's relative age (i.e., compared with the employee's work group). The study assessed (a) the relationships among the age measures, (b) the additive relationships among the age measures that predicted work outcomes, and (c) the interactive relationships among the age measures that predicted work outcomes. Each prediction received some support except for (b). Furthermore, many of the age-work-outcome relationships were replicated in the managerial sample. Implications for the use of alternative age measures are discussed.