ON OPPORTUNITIES Focus on Opportunities as a Mediator of the Relationships between Age , Job Complexity , and Work Performance

Focus on opportunities is a cognitive-motivational facet of occupational future time perspective that describes how many new goals, options, and possibilities individuals expect to have in their personal work-related futures. This study examined focus on opportunities as a mediator of the relationships between age and work performance and between job complexity and work performance. In addition, it was expected that job complexity buffers the negative relationship between age and focus on opportunities and weakens the negative indirect effect of age on work performance. Results of mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation analyses with data collected from 168 employees in 41 organizations (mean age = 40.22 years, SD = 10.43, range = 19 to 64 years) as well as 168 peers providing work performance ratings supported the assumptions. The findings suggest that future studies on the role of age for work design and performance should take employees' focus on opportunities into account. Focus on Opportunities 3 Focus on Opportunities as a Mediator of the Relationships between Age, Job Complexity, and Work Performance Over the past 25 years, the aging of the workforces in most industrialized countries has led to an increased interest among researchers and practitioners in the relationship between age and work performance (McEvoy & Cascio, 1989; Ng & Feldman, 2008; Rhodes, 1983; Sturman, 2003; Waldman & Avolio, 1986). This is not surprising, given that work performance – an individual’s behavior that contributes to the goals and effective functioning of an organization (Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, & Sager, 1993) – is a central construct in work and organizational psychology and has important implications for both employees and organizations (Sonnentag & Frese, 2002). While early reviews reported mixed findings (Rhodes, 1983) or zero relationships between age and task performance (McEvoy & Cascio, 1989), Ng and Feldman (2008) recently published a meta-analysis in which they took the multidimensional nature of work performance into account. They found that although age was largely unrelated to task, innovative, and training performance, older employees seem to contribute more than younger employees to the noncore dimensions of work performance, such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Thus, on a bivariate level, there is now solid evidence on how age is related to work performance. However, the mediating mechanisms in the relationship between age and work performance are so far not well understood (Ng & Feldman, 2008). Research from the fields of adult development and life span psychology has shown that the aging process is accompanied by a number of physical (Hedge, Borman, & Lammlein, 2006), cognitive (Baltes, Staudinger, & Lindenberger, 1999), personality (Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006), emotional as well as motivational changes (Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000; Lang & Carstensen, 2002) that may be important for work performance (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2004). Yet, we are not Focus on Opportunities 4 aware of any empirical study that explicitly examined age-related factors as mediators of the relationship between age and work performance. This would be important however, as “conceptualizing and measuring mediating processes may be one of the most effective ways to help researchers explain why age matters to job performance, not only that age matters to job performance” (Ng & Feldman, 2008, p. 406). In addition, the identification of mediators of the age-performance relationship might help organizational practitioners to maintain or improve older employees’ levels of work performance by changing these mediators through interventions. To address this gap in the literature, the first goal of this study is to investigate employees’ personal focus on opportunities as a mediator of the relationship between age and work performance. Focus on opportunities is an age-related, cognitive-motivational concept that describes how many new goals, options, and possibilities employees generally believe to have in their personal work-related futures (Zacher & Frese, 2009). Employees with a strong focus on opportunities believe that their personal future at work will be full of new goals, options, and possibilities. In contrast, employees with a weak focus on opportunities expect that the number of opportunities in their personal work-related future will be limited. Zacher and Frese (2009) adapted the concept from research on the broader notion of future time perspective in the fields of adult development and life span psychology (Cate & John, 2007) to the occupational context and showed that it is negatively related to age. Even though researchers have speculated that individuals’ focus on opportunities is positively associated with important motivational and behavioral outcomes (Cate & John, 2007), no empirical research has yet investigated this issue. In this study, we draw on possible selves theory (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986) to suggest that focus on opportunities is positively related to work performance. Focus on Opportunities 5 The second goal of this study is to examine focus on opportunities as a mediator of the relationship between job complexity and work performance. Numerous studies have shown that job complexity (i.e., the level of stimulating and challenging demands at work; Fried, Melamed, & Ben-Davis, 2002) is positively related to work performance (Fried & Ferris, 1987). However, it remains an important task of work design research to identify alternative mediators of this relationship (Parker, Wall, & Cordery, 2001). Zacher and Frese (2009) showed that job complexity is positively related to focus on opportunities. In this study, we extend this research by examining focus on opportunities as a mediator between job complexity and performance. Finally, the third goal of this study is to investigate whether high levels of job complexity weaken the assumed negative and indirect effect of age on work performance through focus on opportunities. Such a finding would be important because organizational practitioners then could design jobs in a way that allows employees to maintain a focus on opportunities at higher ages, which in turn may be linked to better work performance. Zacher and Frese (2009) showed that job complexity buffered the negative relationship between age and focus on opportunities. However, the question whether job complexity also contributes to work performance by reducing the negative effect of increasing age on focus on opportunities still needs to be investigated. Our theoretical model is displayed in Figure 1. In the model, age is negatively related to focus on opportunities (Hypothesis 1), and focus on opportunities in turn is positively related to work performance (Hypothesis 2). Focus on opportunities mediates the relationship between age and work performance (negative indirect effect; Hypothesis 3). In addition, job complexity is positively related to focus on opportunities (Hypothesis 4), and focus on opportunities mediates the relationship between job complexity and work performance (positive indirect effect; Hypothesis 5). Job complexity is assumed to moderate the negative relationship between age and Focus on Opportunities 6 focus on opportunities, such that the relationship is weaker for employees in high-complexity jobs than for employees in low-complexity jobs (Hypothesis 6). Finally, we propose that job complexity moderates the negative and indirect effect of age on work performance (through focus on opportunities), such that the indirect effect is weaker for employees in high-complexity jobs than for employees in low-complexity jobs (conditional indirect effect; Hypothesis 7). Conceptualization of Work Performance Work performance can be investigated both as a multidimensional construct as well as a single higher-order or “p-factor” (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2000). Research since the early 1990’s has provided evidence that work performance involves more than just fulfilling the core tasks of one’s job but also, for example, cooperating with others and helping the organization (Campbell et al., 1993). In addition to such a multidimensional conceptualization of work performance, researchers have suggested that a broader, more integrative perspective on work performance may be beneficial in certain situations (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2000). Specifically, predictor variables and outcome variables such as work performance can be expected to be more strongly related if they are conceptualized and measured at the same level of generality. The concept of focus on opportunities refers to employees’ general beliefs concerning the availability of new goals, options, and possibilities in their personal work-related future, and not necessarily to future opportunities in specific work roles such as jobholder, team member, or organizational citizen (Zacher & Frese, 2009). We expect that focus on opportunities is more strongly related to a broader work performance factor than to specific work performance dimensions, because focus on opportunities and overall work performance are conceptualized at similar levels of generality. Thus, we investigated a higher-order work performance factor in this study based on the shared variance of more specific work performance dimensions. Focus on Opportunities 7 Development of Hypotheses Age, Focus on Opportunities, and Work Performance We argue that there are two main reasons why age should be negatively related to focus on opportunities. First, certain age-related norms and constraints in the work context may lead to lower perceptions of future opportunities among older employees compared to younger employees. For example, an age-graded norm in the work context is that older employees are expected to plan for retirement instead of making new and future work-related plans (Hershey, Jacobs-Lawson, & Neukam, 2002). In addition, olde