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Beier, Margaret E.; Kanfer, Ruth; Kooij, Dorien T. A. M.; Truxillo, Donald M.
doi: 10.1111/peps.12544pmid: N/A
As populations in the United States and around the world continue to age, it has become increasingly important to understand how organizations can create working conditions that attract, support, and retain workers across the lifespan. In this paper, we provide a primer on current theory and research on age in the workplace. We briefly describe lifespan theories that have guided recent advances in the field, discuss the implications of these theories for an aging workforce, and provide an overview of current research streams that address the work and nonwork factors affecting performance, well‐being, and workforce participation among mature workers. Based on this review, we provide recommendations for future research and practice.
Li, Yixuan; Kleshinski, Catherine E.; Wilson, Kelly Schwind; Zhang, Kaili
doi: 10.1111/peps.12484pmid: N/A
The global trend of increasing age diversity in workforces has called for research on understanding and managing age differences to better integrate employees across the lifespan into organizations. Integrating aging and lifespan development research and inclusion work, we conduct a daily diary study to investigate age differences in employees’ responses to inclusion experience on a daily basis. In light of socioemotional selectivity theory, we argue that older workers exhibit stronger affective shifts (i.e., increase or upshift in positive affect and decrease or downshift in negative affect) in response to inclusion experience because they are likely to put higher value on social relationships, such that the daily effects of inclusion experience on changes in positive and negative affect are stronger for older (vs. younger) workers through the mediating mechanism of relationship value. We tested our hypotheses by surveying 128 employees from a manufacturing company for 10 consecutive workdays (N = 1248). We found that the daily effects of inclusion experience on affective changes were stronger for older workers through the mediation of higher relationship value. Changes in positive and negative affect, in turn, related to employees’ work engagement over the course of a workday. Our study serves as an important initial step that examines age differences in affective responses to daily inclusion and sheds light on the importance of promoting workplace inclusion for older workers in particular.
Davenport, Meghan K.; Young, Carmen K.; Kim, Michelle H.; Gilberto, Jacqueline M.; Beier, Margaret E.
doi: 10.1111/peps.12535pmid: N/A
The confluence of the aging population and economic conditions that require working longer necessitate a focus on how to best train and develop older workers. We report a meta‐analysis of the age and training relationship that examines training outcomes and moderators with 60 independent samples (total N = 10,003). Framed within the lifespan development perspective, we expected and found that older trainees perform worse (ρ = −.14, k = 34, N = 5642; δ = 1.08, k = 21, N = 1242) and take more time (ρ = .19, k = 15, N = 2780; δ = 1.25, k = 12, N = 664) in training relative to younger trainees. Further, age was negatively related to post‐training self‐efficacy (ρ = −.08, k = 10, N = 4631), but not related to trainee reactions. Moderator analyses provided mixed support that training alone is related to increased mastery of skills and knowledge. No support was found for the moderating effects of pacing or instructional approach. We call for future research examining the interactive effects of training design on older worker outcomes in ways that capitalize on age‐related growth, compensate for decline, and consider the strategies workers use to mitigate the effect of age‐related losses.
De Meulenaere, Kim; Allen, David G.; Kunze, Florian
doi: 10.1111/peps.12505pmid: N/A
The aging population implies a wider age range within a workforce, increasing the risk of age diversity as separation (the clustering into age‐based subgroups), which is considered a turnover stimulator. We provide a new theoretical perspective to age diversity and turnover research, arguing that age separation may not only increase turnover through perceived age discrimination (i.e., a self‐categorization perspective), but can also reduce it through increased perceived belongingness (i.e., a social identity perspective). Following the idea of asymmetric diversity effects, we propose the workforce's average age as a crucial moderator. A longitudinal sample of 2,393 Belgian organizations (2012–2015) reveals that firm‐level age separation stimulates firm‐level collective voluntary turnover, but only in firms with an older average age (Study 1). Data from a representative sample of 4,764 employees from six European countries are consistent with the idea that perceived age separation stimulates aging workers’ turnover intention through increased perceived discrimination and reduced belongingness, and reduces younger workers’ turnover intention through increased belongingness (Study 2). These findings support that age diversity conceptualized as separation is not as unmistakably detrimental for turnover as previously assumed and affects younger and older employees and workforces differently. From a practical perspective, understanding the role of age in the age separation–turnover relationship may help organizations to prevent the loss of valuable knowledge through the departure of both older and younger employees.
Shao, Yiduo; Goštautaitė, Bernadeta; Wang, Mo; Ng, Thomas W. H.
doi: 10.1111/peps.12498pmid: N/A
Workforces are aging rapidly and older workers are typically assumed to take more sickness absence. However, the relationship between age and sickness absence is not well understood, as research has yielded mixed findings and has neglected broader societal factors that cascade to shape the age‐sickness absence relationship. To advance the literature, we adopted a resource‐based perspective and investigated the relationship between employee age and sickness absence as mediated by two countervailing mechanisms: physical health issues and work engagement. We also highlighted two country‐level boundary conditions (health expenditure per capita and labor force participation rate) for these mechanisms. We tested our hypotheses with two archival datasets. In Study 1, using a sample of 28,553 employees from 35 European countries, we tested a multilevel model and found that age was positively related to the number of physical health issues, which in turn was positively associated with sickness absence. Country‐level health expenditure per capita was found to mitigate this relationship. We also found that age was positively related to work engagement, which was negatively related to sickness absence, and country‐level labor force participation rate strengthened this relationship. In Study 2, using a multi‐wave dataset (N = 304) from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the United States, we found further support for the two hypothesized mechanisms (physical health issues and work engagement) between age and sickness absence. Our findings have cross‐national implications for understanding and managing sickness absence by helping workers stay healthier and be more engaged in the context of population aging.
Jiang, Kaifeng; Zhang, Zhen; Hu, Jia; Liu, Guangjian
doi: 10.1111/peps.12480pmid: N/A
Research on retirement decisions has invited studies to examine how personal, work‐related, and environmental factors interplay to affect older workers’ retirement decisions. Drawing upon the person‐environment fit framework, we proposed a negative relationship between high‐involvement work practices (HIWPs) and older workers’ retirement intention. We further developed hypotheses regarding the moderating effects of gender, age, educational level, managerial status, and external economic environment on the relationship between HIWPs and retirement intention. We tested the hypotheses using a sample of 754,856 employees aged 50 and over from 360 U.S. government agencies participating in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey from 2006 to 2015. The results, based on mixed effect logit regressions and cross‐classified modeling, indicated that older workers’ experience of HIWPs had a negative relationship with their retirement intention, and the negative relationship was stronger for older male workers, older workers aged 50–59 years, older workers without a bachelor's degree, and non‐managerial older workers than for older female workers, those aged 60 years or over, those with a bachelor's degree, and those with managerial responsibilities, respectively. Moreover, the results showed that the negative HIWPs‐retirement intention relationship has become stronger since the Great Recession of 2008. We discussed the theoretical and practical implications of older workers’ retirement decisions by considering the interactions between human resource management practices and personal and environmental factors.
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