No reason for conflict with my older leader:Investigating links between leader competence, leader age, and conflict involvement

Prior research has underlined the importance of taking a life-span perspective on leadership in organizations. Nevertheless, the literature on the role of leaders’ age in the organizational context is sparse. We propose that leader age influences the relationship between leader qualities (i.e., competence) and follower involvement in conflict with leaders. We hypothesized that leader competence is negatively related to follower conflict involvement while perceived warmth of the leader mediates this effect. Furthermore, we expected leader age to moderate the indirect effect of leader competence on follower conflict involvement. Study 1, a dyadic field study where leaders reported on their followers’ conflict involvement and followers reported on their leaders’ competence, showed that leader age strengthens the negative effect of leader competence on conflict involvement. Study 2, a two-week time-lagged study among organizational employees and Study 3, a scenario experiment, showed that perceived warmth of the leader mediates the effect of leader competence on conflict involvement. Study 2 further showed that age moderates the indirect effect of leader competence on conflict involvement. Further exploratory analyses showed that leader generativity (Studies 2 and 3) and leader construal of power as responsibility (Study2) might be more relevant mediators in the hypothesized relationships given their closer theoretical relevance with leadership phenomena. We conclude that the potential effects of leaders’ age in the leader-follower relationship deserve more attention than previously awarded