Within-Individual Age-Related Trends, Cycles, and Event-Driven Changes in Job Performance: a Career-Span Perspective
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Within-Individual Age-Related Trends, Cycles, and Event-Driven Changes in Job Performance: a Career-Span Perspective Guido Alessandri 1
&
Donald M. Truxillo 2 & John Tisak 3 & Corrado Fagnani 4 & Laura Borgogni Sapienza 5
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Past research on age-related differences in job performance have focused primarily between-person comparisons. In the present study, we examine within-individual changes in supervisor-rated job performance to examine the influence of age-related trends, cycles, and event-driven factors. Our analysis is based on an eight-wave dataset from a multiple-cohort sample of employees (N = 750) varying in age from 25 to 65 years. We used an age-sequential design to disentangle maturation effects from historical effects. Results showed that population-level, within-individual change in a general measure of job performance was characterized by an increase in the first phase of the career (workers of 25–30 years), and then by a progressive decline. Within-individual levels of job performance were generally higher for younger workers than for older workers, and mostly reflected the influence of population-level trends but some even-driven effects as well. Results were in line with predictions from Baltes and Baltes’s (1990) meta-theory of selective optimization with compensation and the effects of age-related losses on performance. Results also provide insights into understanding the job performance trajectory over the career span. Keywords Within-individual change . Accelerated longitudinal design . Job performance . Latent-growth modeling
With the aging of the industrialized workforce, the effects of age on organizational outcomes such as job performance are of great concern to contemporary organizations (Bohlmann, Rudolph, & Zacher, 2017; McDaniel, Pesta, & Banks, 2012). Older workers (over 50 years) are stereotyped as being slower to adapt to technological and organizational changes, to possess a limited technological expertise, to invest less time at work than in family (Ng & Feldman, 2012; Posthuma & Champion, 2009), and, ultimately, to become over time less productive than younger workers (Avolio & Waldman, 1994; Greller & Simpson, 1999). Younger workers, on the other hand, are stereotyped as being more motivated (Posthuma & Champion, 2009), having higher self-confidence (Kanfer & * Guido Alessandri [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome, Italy
2
Portland State University, Portland, OR 97201, USA
3
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA
4
National Institute of Health, Rome, Italy
5
University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Ackerman, 2004), and possessing higher work-related abilities (McDaniel et al., 2012), although there are negative stereotypes of younger workers as well (e.g., Finkelstein, Ryan, & King, 2013). Over the years, the above concerns have stimulated research on the association between workers’ ag
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