Conflict management and age in service professions

Abstract

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...

Age, emotion regulation strategies, burnout, and engagement in the service sector: Advantages of older workers

“…This suggests that life experience, and not just job experience, is important when determining the use of emotional labour strategies. This is in line with previously reported findings where job age was shown to have little impact on the use of stress management strategies and burnout (Johnson et al, 2013) or conflict management and burnout (Beitler, Machowski, Johnson & Zapf, 2016), again suggesting that it is life experience that is more important than job experience. Practically this is important, if life experience means older individuals have the appropriate skills in terms of emotion regulation to match the requirements of the service sector, then previous job related experience may be less important than life experience when matching applicants to job requirements.…”

“…Furthermore, it is necessary to address the potential influence of cultural characteristics on organizational behaviour (Brodbeck, Frese, & Javidan, 2002) in a sample of German service employees. Beitler et al (2016) discuss that Germany ranks very high on sociocultural dimensions such as assertiveness, uncertainty avoidance, and high on performance orientation (Brodbeck & Frese, 2007;Brodbeck et al, 2002) and report that despite the cultural differences between Germany, China, and the USA similar age effects are reported for conflict management. Similarly, our results about emotion regulation are in line with studies conducted in different cultural contexts.…”

Towards a conceptual and empirical differentiation between workplace bullying and interpersonal conflict

“…And even more so, the behaviour manifested in this episode is not necessarily aggressive but can also be constructive as employees in conflict may, for example, also solve the problem or seek a compromise (Pondy, 1967;Thomas, 1992;Van de Vliert, 1997). In line with this, several studies (e.g., Beitler, Machowski, Johnson, & Zapf, 2016;de Dreu, Evers, Beersma, Kluwer, & Nauta, 2001) show that problem solving is amongst the most frequently used conflict management strategies whereas the opposite can be found for bullying conflicts (Ayoko, Callan, & Härtel, 2003). Consequently, the obvious and frequent occurrence of negative social behaviours, which is an explicit part of workplace bullying, is not a defining characteristic of interpersonal conflicts and can be separated from task and relationship conflicts by confirmatory factor analysis (Leon-Perez et al, 2014).…”

Getting older and living up to implicit followership theories: Implications for employee psychological health and job attitudes

“…To the contrary, a meta‐analysis showed that older employees even outperform younger ones on organizational citizenship behavior directed toward the task, while there was no relationship between age and core task performance in general (Ng & Feldman, ). In the service sector, there is growing evidence that older employees show better performance than their younger colleagues, when coping with stressful customer situations (Beitler, Machowski, Johnson, & Zapf, ; Dormann, Brod, & Engler, ). Yet, despite the lack of supporting evidence, age stereotypes continue to influence decisions at the workplace, leading to adverse employment conditions for older workers (Posthuma & Campion, ; Truxillo & Fraccaroli, ).…”