An analysis of the association between workplace intergenerational mentoring characteristics and employees' receptivity to change: the mediating role of contextualized human capital perception.

In the current business environment, intensified external market competition and rapid technological iteration have made organizational change no longer merely an occasional response to crisis but increasingly a routine condition for organizational survival and development (; ). Whether introducing digital systems or optimizing organizational structures, these changes profoundly affect employees’ work patterns and psychological contracts. At the same time, the labor market presents a significant feature of “multi-generational coexistence” (), and employees of different age groups differ in career stages, experience, and tolerance for uncertainty. This difference often traps management practices into fixed generational stereotypes such as “older employees are naturally more resistant to change” (). Facing the anxiety and resistance caused by normalized change, existing research mostly explores the formation mechanism of change attitudes from top-down perspectives such as leadership, organizational communication, or institutional design, but often ignores the most intensive micro-informal interactions in the workplace. Therefore, internal support networks in the workplace, especially intergenerational mentoring, provide a practically significant entry point for alleviating resistance to change. Intergenerational mentoring not only includes traditional mentoring where senior employees pass on experience to young employees, but also covers reverse support provided by young employees on digital tools and new working methods (; ; ). Whether this cross-age work coaching, emotional comfort, and cognitive communication can promote smooth acceptance of organizational change by employees of different generations holds important empirical testing value. To explore the psychological deduction path between intergenerational mentoring characteristics and receptivity to change, this study introduces and deepens the human capital perspective at the micro level (). Traditional human capital is often viewed as an objective educational background or skill stock. However, in organizational psychology, employees’ responses to uncertainty depend not only on the objective resources they possess, but also on their subjective appraisal of whether these resources are useful, transferable, and sufficient for coping with career risks. Therefore, this study distinguishes objective human capital from contextualized human capital perception. The latter refers to employees’ perceived value, transferability, and marketability of their career-related knowledge, skills, experience, and learning capacity in the context of organizational change. Intergenerational guidance and communication in the workplace can be regarded as a key resource supply channel, which may be associated with a lower sense of change threat and a higher level of receptivity to change through employees’ more positive perception of their own career competitiveness and employability-related human capital. In summary, this study aims to examine the relationship between workplace intergenerational mentoring interactions, employees’ human capital perception, and organizational change receptivity, and focuses on testing the mediating role of human capital perception therein. Furthermore, given the stereotype in management practice that “older employees are more resistant to change” or “younger employees are more likely to accept change,” this study will also exploratively test whether there are significant differences in receptivity to change among employees of different birth generations, rank levels, and industries. This study integrates intergenerational support and individual resource perception into the same research framework, which not only expands relevant theories of the micro-mechanisms of organizational change and multi-generational employee management, but also provides empirical evidence for enterprises to achieve flexible change management by building cross-generational cross-mentoring networks when implementing technological transformation and institutional restructuring. Given the cross-sectional design, this study focuses on theoretically grounded statistical associations rather than establishing temporal or causal ordering among the variables.