This time with feeling: Aging, emotion, motivation, and decision making at work

Motivation and goals are clearly of central importance for successful aging at work as well as for workplace decisions (Kooij et al., 2020). The process model of successful aging at work proposed by Kooij et al. critically considers how the person–environment (P–E) fit for older workers can be optimized through self-regulation. The model draws from theory on goal engagement and goal disengagement as well as how control processes underlie goal attainment, which are primary areas in which emotional processes may play a central role. Specifically, affective and emotional processes are integral parts of motivation and appear to have great utility in understanding adult life-span differences in decision making generally (Mikels et al., 2015) as well as in the workplace more specifically (Brown & Stuhlmacher, 2020). This commentary adds to the roadmap for future organizational research and theory by highlighting age-related motivational and emotional changes related to successful aging at work. As people age, many opportunities exist for goal engagement and disengagement. In considering how changes in goals influence social and emotional processes, one life-span theory of motivation, socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen, 2006), is worth reviewing. In SST, age-associated changes in future time horizons have implications for motivational priorities and emotional experience. Specifically, the theory proposes that when future time horizons are perceived as expansive, as is typical in youth, individuals prioritize future-oriented goals such as acquiring resources and knowledge as well as the development of extended social networks. As time horizons narrow and one’s future time is perceived to be more limited, as is typical in older age, individuals focus on the present moment and prioritize emotionally meaningful goals. This motivational shift is thought to lead to a prioritization of positively valenced and emotionally meaningful experiences in social interactions and beyond. For example, findings indicate that older individuals restructure their social contacts to create close networks of familiar social partners that are conducive to emotionally meaningful and positive interactions. In studies on social partner preferences, older adults have been found to prefer close and familiar social partners over novel social partners (e.g., Fredrickson & Carstensen, 1990). Also, older adults’ social networks are generally smaller and contain relatively more close social partners than those of younger adults (Lang & Carstensen, 2002). These changes in age-related goals relating to social networks are relevant to successful aging in the workplace in several ways. First, organizations can design work and development activities that build meaningful experiences and strong social networks for older workers. For example, individualized coaching would be expected to be particularly effective with older workers because of the relational component and optimizing of the meaningfulness of work. This is consistent with the findings that older clients in executive coaching were more self-reflective, flexible, and less skeptical compared with younger coaching clients (Tamir & Finfer, 2016). Older executives also showed greater improvements in their leader style, technique, and output than their younger