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Knowledge exchange between older and younger employees enhances the collective memory of an organization and therefore contributes to its business success. The purpose of this paper is to take a motivational perspective to better understand why older and younger employees share and receive knowledge with and from each other. Specifically, this study focuses on generativity striving – the motivation to teach, train and guide others – as well as development striving – the motivation to grow, increase competence and master something new – and argues that both motives need to be considered to fully understand intergenerational knowledge exchange.

This paper takes a dyadic approach to disentangle how older employees’ knowledge sharing is linked to their younger colleagues’ knowledge receiving and vice versa. The study applied an actor-partner interdependence model based on survey data from 145 age-diverse coworker dyads to test the hypotheses.

Results showed that older and younger employees’ generativity striving affected their knowledge sharing, which, in turn, predicted their colleagues’ knowledge receiving. Moreover, the study found that younger employees were more likely to receive knowledge that their older colleagues shared with them when they scored higher (vs lower) on development striving.

By studying the age-specific dyadic cross-over between knowledge sharing and knowledge receiving, this research adds to the knowledge exchange literature. This study challenges the current age-blind view on knowledge exchange motivation and provides novel insights into the interplay of motivational forces involved in knowledge exchange between older and younger employees.

We investigate the role of gender in linking communicative acts that occur in the interactions of self-managed teams to emergent leadership. Specifically, this study presents a framework that differentiates between agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication as predictors of emergent leadership, and it hypothesizes that men and women do not differ in what they say but do differ in how they are rewarded (i.e. ascribed informal leadership responsibilities) for their statements.

Interaction coding was used to capture the meeting communication of 116 members of 41 self-managed teams.

Men and women exhibited the same amount of agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication and were equally likely to emerge as leaders. However, men experienced an emergent leadership advantage when engaging in agentic and communal task-oriented behaviors. Agentic and communal relations-oriented behaviors did not predict emergent leadership.

The findings imply that theories could be more precise in differentiating between objective behaviors (i.e. actor perspective) and perceptions thereof (i.e. observer perspective) to understand why women experience a disadvantage in assuming leadership roles.

Although women displayed the same verbal behaviors as men, they experienced different consequences. Organizations can provide unconscious bias training programs, which help increase employees' self-awareness of a potential positive assessment bias toward men's communication.

This research utilizes an innovative, fine-grained coding approach to gather data that add to previous studies showing that, unlike men, women experience a disadvantage in terms of emergent leadership ascriptions when they deviate from stereotypically expected behavior.

Meetings are conducted by increasingly age-diverse participant groups as the workforces in most industrialized economies are aging due to demographic change. There are at least three reasons why meetings constitute a particularly interesting environment to study intergenerational learning processes, defined as individuals’ joint construction of knowledge through an exchange of information with one or more individuals from different age groups. First, meetings allow us to observe a wide variety of interactions that may foster or inhibit intergenerational learning. Second, the interactions taking place in meetings reflect general organizational practices as well as social exchange and age norms. As such, meetings offer a view through the magnifying glass at the age-inclusive or age-discriminating organizational culture which is interwoven with the engagement of different generations in intergenerational learning processes. Third, organizational members use meetings as an arena for strategic interactions to negotiate their current and future status by positioning themselves in relation to their colleagues through social comparisons. This chapter particularly focuses on the latter topic and develops a conceptual model outlining the motivational and emotional coˇnsequences as well as antecedents that link social comparison processes in meetings to intergenerational learning outcomes of participants from different age groups.

During team meetings, expressing negativity about other team members’ ideas and contributions – that is, negative disagreements – can derail team processes and harm team productivity. If team members want to improve their meetings and reduce negativity, which aspects are relevant starting points? This chapter discusses the complexity of this question by considering the interplay of team attributes, individual characteristics, and verbal interaction dynamics that may evoke negative disagreements in meetings. To this end, this chapter relies on existing behavioral and survey data of 259 employees nested in 43 team meetings that were analyzed using statistical discourse analysis. The results of this analysis highlight several potential starting points for reducing negativity in workplace meetings. First, we discovered that team attributes matter, as teams with a lower overall level of job satisfaction were more likely to experience negative disagreements during their meetings. Second, at the individual level, we found a significant gender effect such that women were more likely than men to start negative disagreements. Third, individual team members reporting lower organizational trust were more likely to start negative disagreements. Finally, counter to previous work on interaction dynamics during meetings, we could not identify specific verbal behaviors that triggered negative disagreements. In terms of practical implications, we discuss how managers can increase organizational trust and job satisfaction (e.g., through ensuring justice and improving job design) in order to encourage more positive meeting interactions.

The importance of employer branding to attract talent in organizations is increasing rapidly. Brand personality traits, particularly, have been shown to explain considerable variance in employer brand attractiveness. Despite such awareness, little is known about the underlying processes of this effect. The purpose of the authors is to close the research gap by drawing on a consumer brand model of brand affect and trust as a means of explaining employer brand attractiveness.

Students interested in working in the consultancy industry completed a survey designed to evaluate consultancy employer brands. Established scales for brand personality, trust, and affect, and employer brand attractiveness were used to test the conceptual model.

The results indicate that employer brand trust and affect are both influenced by the brand personality trait sincerity. Further, employer brand affect was positively affected by the traits excitement and sophistication, while negatively affected by ruggedness. Together, employer brand affect and trust explain 71 per cent of the variance in employer brand attractiveness.

While the results show the importance of branding an organization as a sincere, exciting, and sophisticated employer, future research is needed to identify adequate marketing tools to achieve this goal, also in other industries besides the one investigated here.

This study is the first to apply a model that includes brand personality, trust, and affect to employer branding. By doing so, the variance explained in employer brand attractiveness could be increased substantially.