This paper seeks to find answer to the research question: how does age shape one’s instrumental and expressive ties and eventually individual’s performance using a meta-analysis of fifty-eight studies encompassing 11,418 employees in various organizations. Specifically, we investigate the mediating role of instrumental and expressive ties (both incoming and outgoing) in the age-performance association utilizing meta-analytic methods. When compared to younger employees, older employees were less likely to seek out friends and advice in workplace. In contrast, older employees were sought out more for advice than younger ones. Both younger and older employees had higher performance due to different network structures. Younger employees benefited from seeking out more advice whereas older employees benefited by providing advice to more people. Altogether, our results reveal the nuanced role that networks have in shaping the age-performance relationship.
