Supervisor Age and Embeddedness, Employee Embeddedness, and Job Performance

Abstract Guided by social information processing theory and regulatory focus theory, this study examines embeddedness contagion related to supervisors’ age. Older (vs. younger) supervisors are more likely to become embedded in their organizations, and when employees see these older supervisors as more embedded, they are likely to take this as a positive cue signaling them to become embedded in the organization, too. This tendency is an important topic within employee age research because it can strengthen employees’ regulatory focus, which in turn affects their job performance. Analysis of matched data collected from 406 employees and their supervisors showed that supervisors’ age was positively related to supervisors’ perceptions of their own organizational embeddedness, which then positively affected employees’ perceptions of supervisors’ and their own embeddedness. Employee embeddedness perceptions, in turn, were positively related to their promotion and prevention focus. Crucially, promotion focus, but not prevention focus, predicted a variety of performance outcomes. Thus, this study explains why employees are more likely to become organizationally embedded in the presence of older supervisors and shows that such embeddedness contagion enhances their work productivity.