Facilitating age diversity in organizations – part I: challenging popular misbeliefs
Abstract
Purpose
In recent years, significant demographic changes in most industrial countries have tremendously affected the age distribution of workers in organizations. In general, the workforce has become more age-diverse, providing significant and new challenges for human resource management and leadership processes. The current paper aims to address age-related stereotypes as a major factor that might impede potential benefits of age diversity in organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
After a brief review of potential detrimental effects of age-related stereotyping at work, the authors discuss the validity of typical age stereotypes based on new findings from large-scale empirical research with more than 160,000 workers overall.
Findings
Although the research summarized in this review is based on large samples including several thousand workers, the cross-sectional nature of the studies does not control for cohort or generational effects, nor for (self-)selection biases. However, the summarized results still provide important guidelines given that challenges due to age diversity in modern organizations today have to be dealt with regardless of the concrete origins of the age-related differences.
Originality/value
This is one of the first reviews challenging popular misbeliefs about older workers based on large-scale empirical research.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This manuscript was handled by Dianna L. Stone as Action Editor. Writing this review was supported by a research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to the first author (HE 2745/11-3).
Citation
Hertel, G., I.J.M. van der Heijden, B., H. de Lange, A. and Deller, J. (2013), "Facilitating age diversity in organizations – part I: challenging popular misbeliefs", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 28 No. 7/8, pp. 729-740. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-07-2013-0233
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited