What is it about?
An age difference between a leader and an employee does not necessarily affect their working relationship. What may matter more is whether that difference becomes psychologically prominent and shapes how they perceive each other. We surveyed 504 employees at two points four weeks apart. When employees were more conscious of the age difference with their leader, they subsequently reported a lower-quality relationship characterized by less trust, respect, and support. Relationship quality was, in turn, associated with greater work engagement and lower emotional exhaustion. It also statistically explained part of the associations between age-difference salience and these two aspects of employee well-being.
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Why is it important?
As workforces become more age-diverse, organizations should not assume that large age gaps or younger leaders supervising older employees are inherently problematic. The findings suggest that attention should shift from age differences themselves to how they are interpreted within working relationships. Leadership development can help prevent age-based assumptions about competence, motivation, authority, or experience. Age-inclusive HR practices, mentoring, reverse mentoring, and intergenerational learning can frame differences as sources of complementary knowledge. Organizations should nevertheless avoid unnecessarily emphasizing age, as repeatedly highlighting differences may make them more salient. The aim is to strengthen trust and cooperation without reducing people to age-based categories.
Perspectives
Age is readily visible, but it is not always psychologically relevant. For me, the central insight of this study is that age differences do not influence leader-employee relationships mechanically. They become consequential when they serve as a lens through which people interpret competence, authority, or compatibility. The goal should be neither to ignore age nor to continually emphasize it. Organizations should create relationships and cultures in which age is not used as shorthand for what someone can contribute. Under supportive conditions, age differences may become valuable resources for mentoring, reverse mentoring, and mutual learning rather than sources of distance or strain.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Rigotti
Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: More than years? Salience of age differences in leader-member relationships and its relation to LMX, work engagement, and emotional exhaustion, Journal of Managerial Psychology, August 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/jmp-08-2025-0808.
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