What Satisfies Young vs. Old Employees? Interactive Effects of Age, Monetary and Social Rewards

Abstract

In the light of increasingly age-diverse workforces, organizations are confronted with the challenge to implement job rewards which foster the job satisfaction of both younger and older employees. Building upon life-span aging theories, we propose that job rewards are not equally satisfying for employees of all age groups. Instead, we introduce employee age as a central moderator determining how monetary and social rewards affect employees’ job satisfaction. The hypothesized interaction effects were tested in a survey study with 166 managers. We found that younger (but not older) employees were satisfied by monetary rewards, whereas older (but not younger) employees were satisfied by social rewards. Moreover, we found a three-way interaction indicating that younger employees’ job satisfaction was positively affected by monetary rewards, regardless of whether they simultaneously experienced low or high social rewards. In contrast, older employees’ were dissatisfied by increasingly high monetary rewards, but only when they experienced low social rewards at the same time. When social rewards were high, this effect was reversed such that monetary rewards positively contributed to older employees’ job satisfaction.