Age diversity at work place

 

Age diversity at work place

Age diversity can be elucidated as the potentiality of an organization to accept employees of different age categories within the organization’s business environment.

Age diverse teams comprise of colleagues who have aggregated various authoritative, work, or life encounters (Kunze et al., 2011). These colleagues or employees are representatives from various partner groups, with ages differing by over 25 years (Wegge et al., 2008).

Every generation is different and members of each hold unique core values and preferences. These provide each generation essential information about how the other generation wants to be treated, lead and managed. Pay attention to the signals and be respectful of the perspective that each generation brings to the workplace.  (Viki L , 2013).

In the organizations of the developed countries, the age diversity has become a critical challenge (Schneid et al., 2016). In order to establish an age diverse working environment, the organizations are considering on the recruitment of older people (Bohem et al., 2014), halting the early retirements (Dychtwald et al., 2004).

Since there could be both pros and cons of age diversity, the employers should be clever enough to extract only the positive outcomes of all (Bohem et al., 2014).

 Positive and negative effects of age diversity towards work performance (Gordon, 2018; Kunze et al., 2013; Wegge et al., 2012; Backes-Gellner & Veen, 2013; Joshi & Rho, 2009; Shore et al., 2009; Van Dijk et al., 2012)

How Daimler internationally achieves age diversity and work performance

Daimler, one of the biggest producers of premium cars and the world's biggest manufacturer of commercial vehicles (Daimler, 2020) advocates diversity and heterogeneity of the employees.

The organization has taken various measures including,

increase of the retirement age, cooperation between diverse ages (Annual report, 2018), promoting the experienced workers to return back to the work and get involved in short term projects after the retirement,  launching of corporate video platforms where experts could convey the ideas to the younger generations (sustainability report, 2018) to enhance the performance. 

How National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS) applies age diversity to the workplace

NIFS is a government institute for fundamental research in Science, Sri Lanka. The age diversity of the employees varies from young research assistants to senior research professors.

NIFS  has achieved new innovations, patents and new research findings with strong decision making abilities of experienced professionals and enormous working capacity of young people leading to increased productivity in the institute.

NIFS also discourage early retirement of the scientists and promote experienced former scientists (even from foreign countries) to return to research after retirement as visiting scientists.

References

Backes-Gellner, U., & Veen, S. (2013). Positive effects of ageing and age diversity in innovative companies: Large-scale empirical evidence on company productivity. Human Resource Management Journal, 23(3), 279–295. doi:10.1111/1748-8583.12011.

Bell, N. S., & Narz, M. (2007). Meeting the challenges of age diversity in the workplace. The CPA Journal, 77(2), 56–59.

Bertolino, M., Truxillo, D. M., & Fraccaroli, F. (2013). Age effects on perceived personality and job performance. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 28(7/8), 867–885.

Boehm, S. A., Kunze, F., & Bruch, H. (2014). Spotlight on age diversity climate: The impact of age-inclusive HR practices on firm-level outcomes. Personnel Psychology, 67(3), 667–704.

Daimler (2018). Sustainability report 2018. [online] Available from https://sustainabilityreport2018.daimler.com/reports/daimler/annual/2018/nb/English/702030/diversity-management.html [Accessed: 30 April 2021].

Gordon, P.A., 2018. Age diversity in the workplace. In Diversity and inclusion in the global workplace (pp. 31-47). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Joshi, A., & Roh, H. (2009). The role of context in work team diversity research: A meta-analytic review. Academy of Management Journal, 52 (3), 599–627.

Kunze, F., Boehm, S. A., & Bruch, H. (2013). Organizational performance consequences of age diversity: Inspecting the role of diversity-friendly HR policies and top managers’ negative age stereotypes. Journal of Management Studies, 50(3), 413–442. doi:10.1111/joms.12016.

Kunze, F., Boehm, S.A. and Bruch, H. (2011), “Age diversity, age discrimination climate and performance consequences – a cross organizational study”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 264-290.