主题: Is the Head of the Middle-Aged Burdened? The Curvilinear Relationship Between Employee Age and Tolerance for Organizational Exploitation
题目：中年人是否承受着重担？员工年龄与忍耐组织剥削之间的曲线关系
时间: April 16th, 2026 (Thursday) 9:00 am-10:00 am Beijing Time
地点: 管理科研楼第一教室
主讲人: Ziyang Tang, Ph.D. candidate, School of Economics & Management, Tongji University
Bio:
Ziyang Tang is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Economics and Management, Tongji University. She obtained her Master's degree in Management from Tianjin University and her Bachelor's degree in Management from Wuhan University of Technology. Her research focuses on workplace exploitation, workplace perfectionism, population aging, artificial intelligence, and the impostor phenomenon. Her work has been published in the Journal of Management Studies and the Journal of Applied Psychology.
照片：
The recent harsh economic climate has led to an increase in organizational exploitation. Although existing research has examined the adverse outcomes of organizational exploitation, the unique experiences of different age groups under organizational exploitation have been overlooked. Drawing on power dependence theory, we elucidate the curvilinear relationship between employee age and their tolerance for organizational exploitation. To test our hypotheses, we conducted three sequential studies, including a pilot study, a scenario-based experiment, and a survey-based field study. The results show that employee age has an inverted U-shaped relationship with tolerance for organizational exploitation. Compared to younger and older employees, middle-aged employees are most likely to tolerate organizational exploitation. Such tolerance, in turn, leads to compromised work engagement, diminished task performance, and increased work-to-family conflict. Furthermore, the hypothesized inverted U-shaped relationship is more pronounced when employees have higher family motivation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for both research and practice.