As the workforce continues to age, it becomes increasingly important for researchers and practitioners alike to understand the changes that older workers experience across not only performance outcomes but also in their perceptions of their working environment. A large body of research on age and performance suggests that effects are generally small with some evidence for an inverted U-shape (Avolio & Waldman, 1994; Sturman, 2003). Although these relationships are supported across many meta-analyses, the relationship between age and performance is likely much more complex with factors such as type of performance (Ng & Feldman, 2008) and job complexity (Sturman, 2003) moderating the relationship. Furthermore, recent research has called for the examination of mediating mechanisms in the process (Ng & Feldman, 2008), in order to gain a deeper understanding of not only if age affects performance, but if so, why does this happen. Interestingly, an equally large body of research on the relationship between age and job attitudes paints a much clearer picture. Research consistently finds that as individuals’ age they experience increases in a wide range of positive attitudes (Ng & Feldman, 2010). Although this literature is less ambiguous in its findings, some of the same questions about processes and boundary conditions that surround the age-performance relationship exist within the age-attitude literature.

The current chapter aims to address issues surrounding the relationship between age and both performance and attitudes through three main contributions. First, we will briefly review the state of the literature on changing motives within older workers. Second, we will revisit the state of the literature on the role age plays in changes across multiple dimensions of performance and attitudes through the lens of motivational change. Third, we will examine how changes in motives may be related to changes in job attitudes. Figure 1 offers an initial theoretical model for the propositions of this chapter.