Age differences in affective responses to inclusion experience: A daily diary study

Abstract The global trend of increasing age diversity in workforces has called for research on understanding and managing age differences to better integrate employees across the lifespan into organizations. Integrating aging and lifespan development research and inclusion work, we conduct a daily diary study to investigate age differences in employees’ responses to inclusion experience on a daily basis. In light of socioemotional selectivity theory, we argue that older workers exhibit stronger affective shifts (i.e., increase or upshift in positive affect and decrease or downshift in negative affect) in response to inclusion experience because they are likely to put higher value on social relationships, such that the daily effects of inclusion experience on changes in positive and negative affect are stronger for older (vs. younger) workers through the mediating mechanism of relationship value. We tested our hypotheses by surveying 128 employees from a manufacturing company for 10 consecutive workdays ( N = 1248). We found that the daily effects of inclusion experience on affective changes were stronger for older workers through the mediation of higher relationship value. Changes in positive and negative affect, in turn, related to employees’ work engagement over the course of a workday. Our study serves as an important initial step that examines age differences in affective responses to daily inclusion and sheds light on the importance of promoting workplace inclusion for older workers in particular.