It’s an awkward experience so relatable — the older employee who works for a younger boss — that Hollywood has made movies about it. Remember Dennis Quaid’s incredulous look at the much younger Topher Grace in the 2004 film “In Good Company,” when the middle-aged ad exec finds his new corporate boss standing in his office? “How old are you?” Quaid’s character asks, dumbfounded.
But it turns out that uneasy feeling isn’t the only problem. A younger boss steering older subordinates may also have an effect on company performance. An academic study recently published online by the Journal of Organizational Psychology surveyed nearly 8,000 employees at 61 German companies and found that at companies with more younger managers of older employees, workers reported 12 percent more negative emotions on the job. Meanwhile, the companies with more of these negative emotions fared worse when it came to top managers’ reports about financial and organizational performance in the survey.
Merit downsides
The paper is a reminder that, despite all the good that merit systems can do when they’re not based on seniority, they’re also not without their downsides. Doing away with age-based promotions helps prevent stagnant hierarchies, frees up fresh talent and reinforces performance over longevity. But it also sets up dynamics between colleagues that are not only uncomfortable for some, but can be detrimental to productivity if not well-managed.
That awkward feeling when your boss could be your son’s friend is a phenomenon psychologists call “status incongruence.” “They contradict common career and status norms,” said Florian Kunze, a co-author of the paper and a professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany, in an email. That prompts negative feelings, particularly among the older workers, and “these negative feelings can also spread throughout a company also to employees who are not directly part of the unusual age supervisory relationship,” he says.