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Organizations face a progressively ageing workforce and jobs with direct customer contact are growing, creating challenging issues from a human resource management perspective. Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory and lifespan development findings, this study focuses on the research gap in the service sector with regard to age, emotional labour, and associated positive and negative outcomes. Analyses using data from 444 service employees in Germany revealed age is negatively directly related to exhaustion and cynicism, and positively directly related to professional efficacy, as well as positively directly linked to engagement. Additionally, age predicts less burnout and more engagement indirectly through the use of the emotion regulation strategies surface acting and anticipative deep acting. This provides evidence against the general deficit hypothesis of age, which assumes a decline of employee skills and abilities with age. We find no evidence that older workers are worse than younger workers, with older workers using positive emotion regulation strategies, being more engaged and less burnt out.

Purpose -The purpose of this study was to examine age differences in conflict management strategy use, effectiveness, and in exposure to customer stressors in service interactions.Design/methodology/approach -Moderated regression and mediation analyses were conducted to test hypotheses in a sample of 444 German service employees from different service branches with frequent customer contact.Findings -Results revealed that older service employees experienced fewer customer stressors. Customer stressors mediated the negative relationship between age and burnout.Age was associated with use of passive avoidant (avoiding) and active constructive (compromising, problem solving) conflict management strategies. Furthermore, older employees used those strategies more effectively. Especially when avoiding conflicts, older employees reported more professional efficacy than younger colleagues. In contrast, younger employees benefited considerably less from strategy use and reported higher levels of burnout in general. Thus, results suggest older employees' effective conflict management and their positive perception of customer stressors contribute to lower levels of burnout.Practical implications -Results speak against a general deficit model for older workers as they show specific strengths of older employees in social conflicts. TheirOlder service employees' expertise in dealing with negative social interactions represents an important resource for organizations and training interventions, such as mentoring programs.Originality/value -This study is one of the first to examine age-related conflict management skills with regard to customer conflicts, employee health, and effectiveness of strategy use. It replicates existing findings on age and conflict management and extendts them in several ways thereby ruling out alternative explanations for age effects.Keywords: Conflict management, age, burnout, service work, customer stressors Conflict is inevitable in any social life domain and a common experience at the workplace.Service employees with frequent customer contact deal with elevated levels of social conflicts (Bitner et al., 1994; Dormann and Zapf, 2004; Grandey et al., 2002) and therefore require distinct socio-emotionalsocioemotional competencesqualifications, such as appropriate conflict management strategies, in order to successfully manage demanding customer interactions. While demographic change has caused increasing dependency on competent older workers, research on age and socio-emotionalsocioemotional competences at work is scarce (exceptions being, e.g., Dahling and Perez, 2010; Johnson et al., 2013; Yeung and Fung, 2012). Although there is an increasing body of research outside the work domainshowing that older individuals cope more successfully with negative social interactions than younger people (e.g., Blanchard-Fields, 2007; Blanchard-Fields et al., 2007; Diehl et al., 1996), there is hardly any little organizational research on this issue. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two stu...

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