Age differences in feedback reactions: The roles of employee feedback orientation on social awareness and utility.

Abstract

Organizations worldwide are currently experiencing shifts in the age composition of their workforces. The workforce is aging and becoming increasingly age-diverse, suggesting that organizational researchers and practitioners need to better understand how age differences may manifest in the workplace and the implications for human resource practice. Integrating socioemotional selectivity theory with the performance feedback literature and using a time-lagged design, the current study examined age differences in moderating the relationships between the characteristics of performance feedback and employee reactions to the feedback event. The results suggest that older workers had higher levels of feedback orientation on social awareness, but lower levels of feedback orientation on utility than younger workers. Furthermore, the positive associations between favorability of feedback and feedback delivery and feedback reactions were stronger for older workers than for younger workers, whereas the positive association between feedback quality and feedback reactions was stronger for younger workers than for older workers. Finally, the current study revealed that age-related differences in employee feedback orientation could explain the different patterns of relationships between feedback characteristics and feedback reactions across older and younger workers. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications for building theory about workplace aging and improving ways that performance feedback is managed across employees from diverse age groups.

Future Time Perspective in the Work Context: A Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies

“…Change in OFTP might be an important mediating mechanism in this regard. For instance, OFTP might influence whether young, middle-aged, and older workers set short- or long-term goals (Seijts, 1998), and what kind of information workers prioritize when processing external feedback (Wang et al, 2015). Integrating OFTP with the ARAL framework appears to be an important step toward an improved, theory-based understanding of how work behavior changes across the working life span.…”

Negative Attitudes toward Older Workers and Hiring Decisions: Testing the Moderating Role of Decision Makers’ Core Self-Evaluations

“…Also, in our final path model, social desirability has not been found to significantly predict the mediator or the outcome variable. This partly reduces the concern for common-method bias, as the covariation of social desirability and self-reported data represents a rather small systematic error variance explained by the common rating source (Smith and Ellingson, 2002; Wang et al, 2015). …”

“…In addition, we controlled for social desirability using a 13-item scale (Reynolds, 1982) to provide a more conservative examination of the hypothesized relationships and to gauge the extent to which our results might be biased by common method bias (Wang et al, 2015). …”

Age-Differential Effects of Job Characteristics on Job Attraction: A Policy-Capturing Study

“…Truxillo et al (2012) suggested in their model that feedback from the job will be particularly valued by younger workers as they still lack work experience and seek feedback to improve their performance to further their careers. In contrast, older workers are more experienced and have more confidence regarding their performance and therefore need less feedback (Wang et al, 2015). Feedback should therefore be more attractive for younger compared to older workers.…”