Summary Occupational future time perspective (OFTP) refers to employees' perceptions of their future in the employment context. Based on lifespan and organizational psychology theories, we review research on OFTP and offer a meta‐analysis of antecedents and outcomes of OFTP (K = 40 independent samples, N = 19,112 workers). Results show that OFTP is associated with individual characteristics and personal resources, including age (ρ = −0.55), job tenure (ρ = −0.23), organizational tenure (ρ = −0.25), educational level (ρ = 0.16), and self‐rated physical health (ρ = 0.16), as well as job characteristics, such as job autonomy (ρ = 0.22). Moreover, OFTP is related to important work outcomes, including job satisfaction (ρ = 0.28), organizational commitment (ρ = 0.41), work engagement (ρ = 0.22), retirement intentions (ρ = −0.37), and work continuance intentions (ρ = 0.16). OFTP is also related to task (ρ = 0.11) and contextual performance (ρ = 0.20). Additional analyses show that OFTP predicts job attitudes and work performance above and beyond the effects of another developmental regulation construct, selection, optimization, and compensation strategies. Overall, the findings of our meta‐analysis suggest that OFTP is an important construct in the context of an aging workforce.

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There has been growing research interest in what we term empathy-based stress, a process of traumatic stressor exposure, empathic experience, and adverse reactions among particular empathy-related professions, captured in the literatures on compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and vicarious traumatization in trauma-related lines of work. Although these three empathy-based strain constructs are highly related, each represents different components of similar strain responses. Unfortunately, extant reviews of the empathy-based stress literature are non-comprehensive and/or out of date. This qualitative review thus aims to synthesize and summarize the current literature on empathy-based stress at work and contribute to theoretical, methodological, and practical improvements in this area of research and practice. After introducing empathy-based strain constructs and their defining characteristics, we detail our review methodology and the primary theoretical and empirical themes derived through our review of the past decade of published literature. Then, we summarize conceptual, methodological, and analytical gaps in the empathy-based stress literature, helping to generate recommendations for the literature moving forward.

Occupational future time perspective (OFTP) refers to employees’ perceptions of their future in the employment context. Based on lifespan and organizational psychology theories, we review research on OFTP and offer a meta-analysis of antecedents and outcomes of OFTP (K = 40 independent samples, N = 19,112 workers). Results show that OFTP is associated with individual characteristics and personal resources, including age (ρ = -0.55), job tenure (ρ = -0.23), organizational tenure (ρ = -0.25), educational level (ρ = 0.16), and self-rated physical health (ρ = 0.16), as well as job characteristics, like job autonomy (ρ = 0.22). Moreover, OFTP is related to important work outcomes, including job satisfaction (ρ = 0.28), organizational commitment (ρ = 0.41), work engagement (ρ = 0.22), retirement intentions (ρ = -0.37), and work continuance intentions (ρ = 0.16). OFTP is also related to task (ρ = 0.11) and contextual performance (ρ = 0.20). Additional analyses show that OFTP predicts job attitudes and work performance above and beyond the effects of another developmental regulation construct, selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) strategies. Overall, the findings of our meta-analysis suggest that OFTP is an important construct in the context of an aging workforce.

Talk about generations is everywhere and particularly so in organizational science and practice. Recognizing and exploring the ubiquity of generations is important, especially because evidence for their existence is, at best, scant. In this article, we aim to achieve two goals that are targeted at answering the broad question: "What accounts for the ubiquity of generations despite a lack of evidence for their existence and impact?" First, we explore and "bust" ten common myths about the science and practice of generations and generational differences. Second, with these debunked myths as a backdrop, we focus on two alternative and complementary frameworks-the social constructionist perspective and the lifespan development perspective-with promise for changing the way we think about age, aging, and generations at work. We argue that the social constructionist perspective offers important opportunities for understanding the persistence and pervasiveness of generations and that, as an alternative to studying generations, the lifespan perspective represents a better model for understanding how age operates and development unfolds at work. Overall, we urge stakeholders in organizational science and practice (e.g., students, researchers, consultants, managers) to adopt more nuanced perspectives grounded in these models, rather than a generational perspective, to understand the influence of age and aging at work. Keywords Generations. Generational differences. Constructionist perspectives. Lifespan development People commonly talk about generations and like to make distinctions between them. Purported differences between generations have been blamed for everything from declining interest in baseball (Keeley, 2016) to changing patterns of processed cheese consumption (Mulvany & Patton, 2018). In the workplace, generations and generational differences have been credited for everything from declining levels of work ethic (e.g., Cenkus, 2017; cf. Zabel, Biermeier-Hanson, Baltes, Early, & Shepard, 2017), to higher rates of "job-hopping" (e.g., Adkins, 2016; cf. Costanza, Badger,