How do within-person changes due to aging affect job performance?

• This article addresses the relationship between age and job performance.
• First, it highlights five major within-person changes related to aging.
• Next, it discusses how these within-person changes affect job performance.
• The cumulative evidence suggests that older workers are still productive workers.

As the mean age of the workforce in industrialized countries trends upward, increasing attention has been paid to group-level differences between younger and older workers in terms of job performance. The present article takes an alternative perspective by examining within-person changes that occur with aging and how the process of aging affects employees' workplace behavior. We begin by highlighting five areas in which we observe major within-person changes related to aging: (1) cognitive capacity, (2) personality, (3) goal orientation, (4) social-emotional experience, and (5) health. Then, we demonstrate why and how these within-person changes due to aging affect core task performance, citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behavior across the lifespan.