Assessing Younger Worker Prescriptive Stereotypes: The Workplace Ambivalent Youngism Scale (WAYS)

A measure of prescriptive age stereotypes towards younger workers was developed and validated by using a cultural decentred approach, totaling 1,888 participants across four studies. Data was collected from the U.S. and Portugal. In Study 1, participant responses to open-ended questions regarding age-based expectations were thematically analyzed to identify prescriptive age stereotypes towards younger workers. Study 2 explored the factor structure of the item pool in both the U.S. and Portuguese samples. In Study 3, CFA was used to validate the factor structure from the previous exploratory study, examine convergent and divergent validity from proximal constructs, and test for measurement invariance for samples from the U.S. and Portugal. Eight first-order factors emerged, subsumed under three second-order factors: humility-deference, loyalty-belonging, and vitality-innovation. The scale shows ambivalent expectations regarding younger workers, who are, on the one hand, supposed to accept their lower social status, and on the other hand, expected to show attributes usually associated with higher status groups, and was therefore named the Workplace Ambivalent Youngism Scale (WAYS). Finally, Study 4 tested, in a two-wave questionnaire, the predictive power of WAYS in relation to several important workplace outcomes, relating to perceived age discrimination, justice perceptions, in-role and extra-role performance, turn-over intentions, and well-being outcomes.