Wednesday 22 July 15:40
- 17:10
Hall: 01 - Basilica
Chair:
Vignoli Michela
Division: Division 1: Work and Organizational Psychology
Considering the tensions between different age groups, which entail substantial costs both for organizations and society, this symposium seeks to advance a more optimistic vision by highlighting age-diverse friendships as a promising solution able to contribute to mitigating societal tensions and fostering broader social cohesion. Age-diverse friendships, also referred to as intergenerational friendships, are defined as socioemotional-meaningful relationships between people of different ages, typically with an age difference of 10 to 15 years. Aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of how age-diverse friendships in the workplace can generate positive outcomes both for organizations and society, this symposium will present the promising preliminary findings from the Volkswagen-funded research project "Overcoming Societal Tensions in Europe: Can Age-Diverse Friendships be the Solution?". The first presentation will be a conceptual paper that introduces a new taxonomy describing how age-diverse friendship at work can affect not only the dyad but also different-aged outgroup members, other non-involved groups, and all humanity at large. The second presentation, employing AI and topic modeling, will demonstrate how workers define their experiences of age-diverse and non-age-diverse friendships. The third presentation will focus on dyads of age-diverse workers and will demonstrate that age-diverse workplace friendships are associated with trust and bystanding not only toward the age-diverse friend but also toward the friend's entire age group. The fourth presentation will show how high-quality contact between age-diverse friends is related to greater support for outgroups not involved in the friendship and factors that moderate this effect. Using a diary methodology, the fifth study will provide evidence for how age-diverse workplace friendship is positively associated with cognitive liberalization, which describes the process by which individuals "stop thinking in boxes" and instead engage in active, complex, and inclusive thinking. Finally, the sixth presentation will provide new insights into interventions to promote age-diverse workplace friendships.
