Previous research has illustrated that older workers have high emotional competence (EC) that could enable them to effectively manage interpersonal conflict. However, it is still unclear whether age, potentially via EC, also influences a variety of conflict management behaviors. To address this question, we present a systematic review of the literature on the direct relationships between age, EC, and conflict management, and on EC as a potential mediator. We classify conflict management behaviors using the dual concern model (e.g., De Dreu, Evers, Beersma, Kluwer, & Nauta, 2001), and identified 15 studies on age-related conflict management, and 14 studies on EC and conflict management. Unfortunately, we found that none of the previous studies examined EC as a mediator between age and conflict behaviors. Overall, our review does reveal a positive age trend for EC, avoiding, compromising, and problem-solving, and a negative age trend for forcing. Additionally, EC seems to be positively related to problem-solving, compromising, and yielding. We discuss potential moderators and the role of EC as a potential mediator.

Purpose -The purpose of this study was to examine age differences in conflict management strategy use, effectiveness, and in exposure to customer stressors in service interactions.Design/methodology/approach -Moderated regression and mediation analyses were conducted to test hypotheses in a sample of 444 German service employees from different service branches with frequent customer contact.Findings -Results revealed that older service employees experienced fewer customer stressors. Customer stressors mediated the negative relationship between age and burnout.Age was associated with use of passive avoidant (avoiding) and active constructive (compromising, problem solving) conflict management strategies. Furthermore, older employees used those strategies more effectively. Especially when avoiding conflicts, older employees reported more professional efficacy than younger colleagues. In contrast, younger employees benefited considerably less from strategy use and reported higher levels of burnout in general. Thus, results suggest older employees' effective conflict management and their positive perception of customer stressors contribute to lower levels of burnout.Practical implications -Results speak against a general deficit model for older workers as they show specific strengths of older employees in social conflicts. TheirOlder service employees' expertise in dealing with negative social interactions represents an important resource for organizations and training interventions, such as mentoring programs.Originality/value -This study is one of the first to examine age-related conflict management skills with regard to customer conflicts, employee health, and effectiveness of strategy use. It replicates existing findings on age and conflict management and extendts them in several ways thereby ruling out alternative explanations for age effects.Keywords: Conflict management, age, burnout, service work, customer stressors Conflict is inevitable in any social life domain and a common experience at the workplace.Service employees with frequent customer contact deal with elevated levels of social conflicts (Bitner et al., 1994; Dormann and Zapf, 2004; Grandey et al., 2002) and therefore require distinct socio-emotionalsocioemotional competencesqualifications, such as appropriate conflict management strategies, in order to successfully manage demanding customer interactions. While demographic change has caused increasing dependency on competent older workers, research on age and socio-emotionalsocioemotional competences at work is scarce (exceptions being, e.g., Dahling and Perez, 2010; Johnson et al., 2013; Yeung and Fung, 2012). Although there is an increasing body of research outside the work domainshowing that older individuals cope more successfully with negative social interactions than younger people (e.g., Blanchard-Fields, 2007; Blanchard-Fields et al., 2007; Diehl et al., 1996), there is hardly any little organizational research on this issue. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two stu...

Addressing health-related risks for employees in the service sector, we identify emotion regulation (ER) ability—a dimension of emotional intelligence—as a promising resource with potential for facilitating emotional labor. We use an event-sampling design to investigate whether person-level ER ability moderates situation-dependent relationships of three different emotional labor strategies with emotional exhaustion in a beneficial way. Study 1 included data from 861 customer interactions from 187 service employees in the financial sector. All measures were self-ratings. Study 2 included 479 interactions from 101 employees in different service occupations; following a multimethod approach, ER ability was additionally assessed with peer ratings and an objective test. Controlling for age and gender, hierarchical linear modeling analyses indicated main effects of event-level surface acting and automatic regulation on emotional exhaustion in both studies. Multilevel results showed that ER ability—in contrast to the global score of emotional intelligence—moderated relationships of three different emotional labor strategies with exhaustion. In particular, resource loss via surface acting was buffered. Overall, findings contribute to knowledge on emotional abilities in emotional labor processes, and differences in operationalizing and assessing ER ability. Practical implications concerning employee health are given.

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