Gender, age and tenure as moderators of work-related stressors' relationships with job performance: A meta-analysis

We investigated the extent to which three socio-demographic variables, employee gender, age, and tenure, moderated the meta-correlations of role conflict and role ambiguity with job performance. To test these moderating effects, we quantitatively synthesized 30 independent studies (total N = 7700). No moderating effects were found for gender and tenure. Controlling for employee tenure and gender, we found that employee mean age had a moderating effect on the role ambiguity-performance correlation, with negative correlations tending to decrease with increasing age. Moreover, two significant two-way interactions were found between the moderators. As the percentage of women in the studies and the respondents' mean age simultaneously increased, and as the mean sample tenure and age of the respondents in the studies simultaneously increased, there was a reduction in the negative relationship between role ambiguity and performance. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.