Age, emotion regulation strategies, burnout, and engagement in the service sector: Advantages of older workers

Organizations face a progressively ageing workforce and jobs with direct customer contact are growing, creating challenging issues from a human resource management perspective. Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory and lifespan development findings, this study focuses on the research gap in t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Machowski, Sabine, Holdsworth, Lynn, Kern, Marcel, Zapf, Dieter
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid
Repositorio:Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology
OAI Identifier:oai:journals.copmadrid.org:jwop/art/j.rpto.2017.09.001
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rpto.2017.09.001
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Emotional labour, Emotion regulation, Burnout, Engagement, Older workers
Trabajo emocional, Regulación emocional, Burnout, Implicación laboral, Trabajadores mayores
Descripción
Sumario:Organizations face a progressively ageing workforce and jobs with direct customer contact are growing, creating challenging issues from a human resource management perspective. Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory and lifespan development findings, this study focuses on the research gap in the service sector with regard to age, emotional labour, and associated positive and negative outcomes. Analyses using data from 444 service employees in Germany revealed age is negatively directly related to exhaustion and cynicism, and positively directly related to professional efficacy, as well as positively directly linked to engagement. Additionally, age predicts less burnout and more engagement indirectly through the use of the emotion regulation strategies surface acting and anticipative deep acting. This provides evidence against the general deficit hypothesis of age, which assumes a decline of employee skills and abilities with age. We find no evidence that older workers are worse than younger workers, with older workers using positive emotion regulation strategies, being more engaged and less burnt out.