Employee Age Alters the Effects of Justice on Emotional Exhaustion and Organizational Deviance

Abstract

Fairness in the workplace attenuates a host of negative individual and organizational outcomes. However, research on the psychology of aging challenges the assumption that fairness operates similarly across different age groups. The current research explored how older workers, vis-à-vis younger workers, react to perceptions of fairness. Integrating socioemotional selectivity theory and the multiple needs theory of organizational justice, we generated novel predictions regarding the relations between perceptions of workplace justice, emotional exhaustion, and employee deviance. Specifically, we hypothesized and found that employee age moderates the negative relation between justice facets and deviance (Study 1) and emotional exhaustion (Study 2). We also found that emotional exhaustion mediates the differential effects of justice on deviance, and that this relation depends on employee age (Study 2). Relative to younger workers, older workers are more sensitive to informational and interpersonal justice; in contrast, relative to older workers, younger workers are more sensitive to distributive and procedural justice. The research supports and extends existing theory on organizational justice and on the psychology of aging. Moreover, it highlights the importance of considering employee age as a focal variable of interest in the study of justice processes, and in organizational research more generally.

Keywords: deviance; emotional exhaustion; employee age; instrumental and relational needs; organizational justice.

Figure 1

Conceptual moderated mediation model. Emotional exhaustion mediates the negative relations between distributive and procedural justice on deviance among younger employees; emotional exhaustion mediates the negative relations between informational and interpersonal justice on deviance among older employees.

Figure 2

(Left) Study 1 interaction between age and distributive justice on employee deviance (1–5), plotted at ±1 SD around the means on the continuous predictors. (Right) Study 1 interaction between age and informational/interpersonal justice on employee deviance, plotted at ±1 SD around the means on the continuous predictors.

Figure 3

(Left) Study 2 interaction between age and distributive/procedural justice on emotional exhaustion (0–36), plotted at ±1 SD around the means on the continuous predictors. (Right) Study 2 interaction between age and informational/interpersonal justice on emotional exhaustion, plotted at ±1 SD around the means on the continuous predictors.