Aging and work: The role of emotional factors and competencies

Across the globe, workforces are aging. In organizations, these demographic trends are often perceived as threats to organizational effectiveness. Are such fears justified? Older workers certainly face physical and cognitive challenges, but they also have strengths in emotional functioning; these deserve more research attention. This symposium examines age differences in workers’ emotional experiences and competencies and links these with indicators of well-being and performance. Going beyond average age affects, the five papers draw attention to contextual and individual difference factors that modulate age differences. Scheibe and Moghimi report on a diary study suggesting adaptive shifts in emotion regulation strategies with age as a function of contextual factors such as emotional intensity. Yeung and colleagues report an experimental study on age differences in emotional and behavioral reactions to workplace conflicts, also exploring the role of context. Peng and colleagues collected cross-sectional field data from a large sample of employees and found that older workers appear to be more resilient towards abusive supervision than young workers through higher levels of reappraisal. Toomey and Rudolph focus on daily expressions of empathy in an experience-sampling study; they found older workers to show more stable and increasing empathy across the week through political skills (a personal resource). Finally, Reh and colleagues examine the long-term development of emotional functioning of workers, posing the question how occupational role demands shape trajectories of emotional aging. Overall, the studies provide support for the emotional strengths of an aging workforce and identify their mechanisms and facilitating factors.