The age context of performance-evaluation decisions.

Organizational demography contends that demographic characteristics of individuals, examined at individual, dyadic, group, and organizational levels of analysis, exert significant effects on organizational processes. The purpose of this article was to test the contextual effects created by the interaction of work-group age composition and supervisor age on supervisor evaluations of subordinate performance. Two competing models of age demography were tested. The similarity model predicts that supervisors similar in age to the work group they supervise will issue generally higher performance ratings. The dissimilarity model, developed in this article, predicts the opposite. Support was indicated for the dissimilarity model. Implications of the results are discussed.