Drawing on relational demography, leader-member exchange, and transformational leadership, this dissertation examines the impact of age diversity on the quality of manager-employee work interactions, transformational leadership behaviors, job satisfaction, and affective commitment in two high-tech French organizations. Age diversity is herein considered in terms of differences, similarities, and interaction terms between chronological and subjective dimensions of age. This research posits that age diversity between managers and their dyadic collaborators is paramount for the quality of their daily work interactions, for transformational leadership behaviors, impacting as well on their job satisfaction and organizational affective commitment. Our findings show that chronological age, subjective age as well as their interaction terms play an important role in the perceptions about the quality of work exchanges between managers and their direct reports, depending on whether the managers are younger or older than the employees. In addition, this research shows that age diversity may facilitate managers to display transformational leadership behaviors. On the one hand, our findings suggest that the greater the (chronological or subjective) age differences between older managers and their younger reports, the more likely are the managers to display transformational leadership behaviors. On the other hand, when the managers are younger than the employees, they are less likely to display transformational leadership behaviors at the workplace. Moreover, the greater the age distance between younger managers and older reports, the less likely is for the employees to perceive their younger superiors as able to display transformational leadership. Our results highlight also that the LMX interactions mediate the relationship between age diversity and job satisfaction especially when managers are older than their dyadic partners. Furthermore, this study underscores a number of positive direct effects of managers' and employees' ages on the job satisfaction and organizational affective commitment, depending on whether managers are younger or older than their collaborators. This work highlights the importance of further research on the role and meaning individuals assign to age, on the one hand, and the need for a closer examination of its complex effects on work attitudes and behaviors, on the other hand. In terms of practical and managerial implications, these findings may help managerial practice in the organizations comprising work teams whereby chronologically / subjectively younger managers and older employees or vice versa collaborate daily. As for research implications, this dissertation emphasizes the particular usefulness to simultaneously examine managers' and employees' ages for a more thorough understanding of their effects on organizational outcomes such as those presently studied.
