Negotiating the Middle: A Promotion-Prevention Explanation of Midlife Identity Negotiation and Leadership
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Burke, Vanessa
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 22, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Jes Matsick, Major Field Member
Samuel Hunter, Major Field Member
Aparna Joshi, Outside Unit & Field Member
Alicia Grandey, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Kristin Buss (she/her), Program Head/Chair
David Almeida, Outside Field Member - Keywords:
- Midlife
leadership
generativity
disengagement
acceptance
successful aging
Aging workforce - Abstract:
- Midlife employees (around 40-55 years old) comprise nearly a third of the current workforce yet have been overlooked in literature on aging in organizational sciences. Midlife is a critical juncture for career trajectories, as a generative time with opportunities for mentoring and leadership roles, with implications for pay and status in late career phases. Yet, midlife is also a life stage where people feel threatened due to undesirable physiological changes (i.e., physical, cognitive). Addressing a critical life phase and intersecting career choices, I integrate interdisciplinary literatures to develop novel theorizing about how midlife aging is related to identity transitions and how employees use both prevention- (disengagement) and promotion-oriented (generativity/acceptance) strategies to negotiate changes in organizations. I examine chronological aging (i.e., changes in years old) and physiological aging (i.e., perceived changes to body and mind), with psychosocial aging (i.e., promotion/prevention response) to predict who is a leader later in their career and the amount of status held in that position. I conducted an initial test of these ideas using two waves of data 7-10 years apart from 691 employed participants of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) research project. Results reveal that perceived physiological changes (body and mind) did not predict leadership, but chronological aging and psychosocial reactions to aging (generativity, disengagement, and acceptance) predict who is a leader later in their career and how many employees they supervise. These psychosocial reactions varied by employee sex: Midlife women who were chronologically older were more disengaged from goals and focused on generativity, with opposing relationships with leadership. Midlife men were less likely to have leader roles and supervisees when they perceived their physiological changes negatively and were less accepting of themselves.