Are Workplace Friendships Nothing for Older Workers? Decoding the Psychological Mechanisms Linking Age to Workplace Friendship

ABSTRACT Given the benefits of workplace friendship, understanding its maintenance is essential. Age is particularly relevant due to the aging and increasingly age‐diverse workforce, yet its relationship with workplace friendship remains unclear, with prior studies reporting positive, negative, or null correlations. As age itself is a proxy for further age‐related processes, we grounded our research in a temporal perspective and uncovered two competing pathways to explain the mixed findings: Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory, we hypothesized that age is positively related to workplace friendship via occupational future time perspective and subsequent prioritization of socioemotional goals. Conversely, based on disengagement theory, we hypothesized that age is also negatively related to workplace friendship via occupational future time perspective and subsequent late career disengagement. Additionally, we explored whether friendship type preference (i.e., the value placed on workplace friends relative to nonwork friends) moderates these competing pathways. We conducted a field study with 902 employees across three waves to test our hypotheses. A moderated serial mediation analysis revealed that age was indirectly positively associated with workplace friendship via lower occupational future time perspective and higher socioemotional goal prioritization, whereas age was also indirectly negatively associated with workplace friendship via lower occupational future time perspective and higher late career disengagement. Moreover, friendship type preference moderated the negative pathway, highlighting its role as a boundary condition. These findings contribute to the workplace friendship literature by identifying key age‐related processes that shape workplace friendship and by providing new insights into factors influencing its maintenance.