The impact of supervisor age on employee job satisfaction

Abstract

As workers in the United States get older, it is increasingly likely that they will have significantly younger supervisors. In these instances, workers experience status incongruence – the supervisor–subordinate relationship does not conform to social ‘norms’. As a result workers may, in some instances, be dissatisfied with their opportunities for advancement if they have a significantly younger supervisor. This is most likely the case among more educated workers, potentially leading to lower job satisfaction and increased likelihood of quits. Ordered probit estimations of the 2008 wave of the National Study of the Changing Workforce confirm these hypotheses.

Keywords:

• job satisfaction
• supervisor age
• status congruence
• promotion

JEL Classification:

• J11
• J28

Notes

¹ Statistics taken from ‘Older Employees in the Workforce’, Generation and Gender in the Workplace, Families and Work Institute, 2002.

² See ‘What is the Average Retirement Age?’ from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for a good brief on changing trends in retirement.

³ This would necessarily require the average age of supervisors to increase over time at a slower pace than the broader workforce. Evidence taken from the NSCW shows an overall increase of roughly 4% of the workforce citing significantly younger supervisors between 2002 and 2008.

⁴ Ai and Norton (2003) propose that marginal effects of interaction terms in nonlinear models are not accurate. However, Greene (2010) suggests that marginal effects of these types can indeed be used for simple implications about the model's coefficients; just notably not for hypothesis testing.