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With the aging of the global workforce, it is crucial to deepen our understanding of how to keep older workers healthy, motivated, and productive. In this research, we integrate job design with socioemotional selectivity theory to propose that social job characteristics relate to employee performance differently for older and younger workers. Specifically, in a 3-wave survey (N = 454), we tested employee age as a moderator of the relationships between receiving social support and feedback at work, and performance, as well as giving social support and feedback at work, and performance. The results showed that, in general, both receiving and giving social support and feedback are associated more strongly with the performance of older than younger workers. The findings provide important theoretical implications for the study of aging and work; they also offer practical applications for creating workplaces in which older workers can reap the benefits of social relationships to remain productive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Emerging research demonstrates that female managers who mistreat their subordinates suffer more severe negative consequences than male managers. Researchers presume this is because women (but not men) are penalized for acting incongruently with communality prescriptions (i.e., being insufficiently kind). However, integrating this work with the broader literature on gender and leadership, gendered reactions to mistreatment could also—or alternatively—be explained by incongruence with high agency proscriptions (i.e., being too dominant). We model these mechanisms simultaneously in a moderated mediation model across three studies, and find that employees are less trusting of female than male managers because they interpret interpersonal justice violations from women as incongruent with low agency prescriptions. Our results challenge a prevailing assumption in the mistreatment literature by revealing that female managers suffer more severe relational consequences than male managers because their violation of interpersonal justice is construed as excessively agentic, whereas these behaviors are viewed as similarly contravening communality for both male and female managers. By directly testing and correctly specifying the mechanism through which manager gender can shape social exchange processes in the aftermath of manager mistreatment, our studies have scientific and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw from theory on motivated reasoning to suggest that men would be more prone toward gender pay gap scepticism (PGS) than women because doing so maintains a valued but illusory belief that society is currently fair. Integrating theory on wisdom and wise reasoning—a self‐transcendent thinking process composed of intellectual humility, contextualism, perspectivism and dialecticism—we also hypothesised that men who engaged in stronger (vs. weaker) wise reasoning about the pay gap would be less prone toward PGS. Two pre‐registered studies (N = 651) supported the predictions: generally, men were more prone toward gender PGS than women, while wise reasoning tended to attenuate scepticism in men. The patterns of effects remained stable when controlling for income, education, political orientation, and perceptions of the effects of COVID‐19 on women's economic and psychological well‐being. Our studies pave the way for interventions that alter how people reason about inequities such as the gender pay gap in an effort to create fairer workplaces and societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]