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Who Benefits More? The Moderating Role of Age on the Relationship Between Work and Person Characteristics and Employee Attitudes and Wellbeing

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Abstract

The current study examines whether certain work (decision-making autonomy) and person (optimism) characteristics would be differentially related to job attitudes and wellbeing of nurses of different ages. We draw upon lifespan development perspective (Selection-Optimization-Compensation) to argue why decision-making autonomy and optimism would be more strongly related to work engagement and emotional exhaustion for older nurses compared to their younger colleagues. The findings supported our hypotheses in that autonomy and optimism had greater utility for older nurses. That is, compared to their younger colleagues, when older nurses had greater levels of autonomy and optimism, they had greater work engagement and less emotional exhaustion. Overall, these findings support lifespan development perspective to explain age-based differences in how work and person characteristics relate to occupational outcomes. We discuss the implications of our findings for an age-diverse workforce and outline several avenues for future research.

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Notes

  1. We also considered to control for gender, working hours per week, and part-time/full-time status of participants, however, as can be seen in Table 1, in our sample, they were not related to the variables of interest.

  2. Full results are available from the first author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Oregon Nurses Association for their support throughout the research process.

Funding

Funding for this project was through the Faculty Enhancement Grant from Portland State University.

The first author was supported by a grant from NIOSH [grant number T03OH008435–11], Graduate Training in Occupational Health Psychology, during her work on the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Business, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR, 97207-0751, USA

    Lale M. Yaldiz & David M. Cadiz

  2. Department of Psychology, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR, 97207-0751, USA

    Donald M. Truxillo

  3. The Kemmy Business School, Department of Work and Employment Studies, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Donald M. Truxillo

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  1. Lale M. Yaldiz
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Correspondence to Lale M. Yaldiz.

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Yaldiz, L.M., Truxillo, D.M. & Cadiz, D.M. Who Benefits More? The Moderating Role of Age on the Relationship Between Work and Person Characteristics and Employee Attitudes and Wellbeing. Occup Health Sci 4, 139–160 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41542-019-00053-1

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