Brienza Justin P, Bobocel D Ramona
Departmental of Psychology, University of WaterlooWaterloo, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2017 Apr 6;8:479. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00479. eCollection 2017.
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.
职场公平性可减少一系列负面的个人和组织结果。然而，关于衰老心理学的研究对公平性在不同年龄组中以相似方式起作用这一假设提出了挑战。当前的研究探讨了年长员工相对于年轻员工如何对公平感做出反应。整合社会情感选择性理论和组织公正的多种需求理论，我们对职场公正感、情感耗竭和员工越轨行为之间的关系得出了新的预测。具体而言，我们假设并发现员工年龄会调节公正维度与越轨行为（研究1）以及情感耗竭（研究2）之间的负相关关系。我们还发现情感耗竭在公正对越轨行为的差异影响中起中介作用，并且这种关系取决于员工年龄（研究2）。相对于年轻员工，年长员工对信息公正和人际公正更为敏感；相反，相对于年长员工，年轻员工对分配公正和程序公正更为敏感。该研究支持并扩展了关于组织公正和衰老心理学的现有理论。此外，它强调了在公正过程研究以及更广泛的组织研究中，将员工年龄视为一个重要关注变量的重要性。
