Claudia Buengeler 

Younger leaders are often perceived as less prototypical and legitimate, particularly by older evaluators and in traditional leadership contexts. Integrating leadership categorization theory with a connectionist perspective on prototype activation, we examine how age bias in leadership perception is shaped by organizational context and evaluator age. In an experiment (N = 658), we manipulated CEO age and leadership role (traditional vs. change-oriented) to test the underlying mechanism of prototype (mis)match. Older evaluators rated younger CEOs as significantly less prototypical in traditional roles but not in change-oriented roles, whereas younger evaluators showed no consistent bias. In a complementary archival study of 1,573 CEO successions in S&P-listed firms (2000–2020), higher average board age predicted a lower likelihood of appointing a younger CEO—an effect attenuated under conditions of organizational change (dismissal of the predecessor and external succession). Together, the findings show that age bias is context-dependent, amplified by evaluator age and stability-focused settings, but attenuated in change-oriented contexts. This research identifies key boundary conditions under which younger leaders can overcome prototype incongruence.