Managing conflict in the workplace: The role of leader and employee age

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Frank Walter
• Subject Area: Management and Marketing ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560050818

Given an unprecedented increase in human longevity, issues surrounding the management of an aging workforce have taken center-stage in organizational research. The academic leadership literature has only recently turned towards considering age as a substantive concept, however, such that important unresolved questions remain about the role of leaders’ as well as employees’ age for leadership processes and outcomes. The present project focuses on a central aspect in this regard, examining age-related influences on the management of conflicts between leaders and their employees. It develops and empirically tests new theory to better understand (a) how leaders’ age shapes their strategies for managing employee conflicts and (b) how both leaders’ and employees’ age shapes the consequences associated with such strategies. Hence, this research aims to advance more viable and timely leadership theories and offer practical recommendations for organizations faced with an increasingly older and more age-diverse workforce. The project entails three phases. Phase 1 focuses on the role of leaders’ age for their use of constructive vs. destructive conflict management strategies. It addresses theoretical ambiguity and apparent contradictions in prior research by highlighting key psychological mechanisms and contextual boundary conditions underlying these linkages. Phase 2 turns toward an outcome-oriented perspective, examining how leaders’ age alters the downstream consequences of their conflict management. Drawing from theory on age-based stereotypes, it explicates why the same conflict management strategies may be more or less effective among leaders of different ages. Finally, Phase 3 moves beyond this leader-centered approach to integrate the role of employees’ age. It highlights age-related psychological developments as key contingency factors that influence employees’ reactions toward leaders’ conflict management and, thus, further shape the success of such efforts. Taken together, the proposed research promotes a novel, comprehensive understanding of age-related implications for the management of leader-employee conflicts. In doing so, it strives to advance theory on leadership in modern organizations by creating new knowledge on the pivotal role of leaders’ and employees’ age.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants