Research news: Employees’ perceptions of their future | Gendered ageism | Leveraging mature workers
Occupational Future Time Perspective: A Meta-Analysis of Antecedents and Outcomes
Rudolph, C., Kooij, D., Rauvola, R., & Zacher, H. (2018). Occupational future time perspective: A meta‐analysis of antecedents and outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(2), 229–248. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2264
Occupational future time perspective (OFTP) refers to employees’ perceptions of their future in the employment context. Based on lifespan and organizational psychology theories, we review research on OFTP and offer a meta-analysis of antecedents and outcomes of OFTP (K = 40 independent samples, N = 19,112 workers). Results show that OFTP is associated with individual characteristics and personal resources, including age (ρ = -0.55), job tenure (ρ = -0.23), organizational tenure (ρ = -0.25), educational level (ρ = 0.16), and self-rated physical health (ρ = 0.16), as well as job characteristics, like job autonomy (ρ = 0.22). Moreover, OFTP is related to important work outcomes, including job satisfaction (ρ = 0.28), organizational commitment (ρ = 0.41), work engagement (ρ = 0.22), retirement intentions (ρ = -0.37), and work continuance intentions (ρ = 0.16). OFTP is also related to task (ρ = 0.11) and contextual performance (ρ = 0.20). Additional analyses show that OFTP predicts job attitudes and work performance above and beyond the effects of another developmental regulation construct, selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) strategies. Overall, the findings of our meta-analysis suggest that OFTP is an important construct in the context of an aging workforce.
Gendered Ageism and Dis/abl(e)ism
Research from the University of Kent Economic and Social Research Council, currently underway.
This research will improve our understanding of how ageism and dis/abl(e)ism are related to one another and how it affects self-exclusion. Therefore it will give indications for interventions to increase the labour market participation of older workers and it will suggest which stereotypes are especially detrimental for their employment. The project will involve stakeholders from business and the charitable sectors to work through the implications of this study to produce practical interventions. More information
Leveraging Aging Workforce and Age Diversity to Achieve Organizational Goals: A Human Resource Management Perspective
Froidevaux A., Alterman V., Wang M. (2020) Leveraging Aging Workforce and Age Diversity to Achieve Organizational Goals: A Human Resource Management Perspective. In: Czaja S., Sharit J., James J. (eds) Current and Emerging Trends in Aging and Work. Springer, Cham
Given the aging trend in the labor force, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of how human resource management (HRM) practices can support the age-diverse workforce and facilitate the maintenance of both younger and older workers’ collective job performance. In this chapter, we propose an HRM perspective to examine how organizations can leverage an aging workforce and age diversity to achieve strategic goals. Specifically, we describe age-specific HRM practices, which are often used to counterbalance traditional stereotypical negative views of older workers. Additionally, given the increasingly popular adoption of a broad work-lifespan view about age management, we also describe age-neutral HRM practices. This view focuses on practices targeted at employees from early- to late-career stages, promoting an understanding of aging as an individual change process in terms of motivation, values, competencies, and behavior. Most of the HRM practices we focus on can be translated into both age-specific and age-neutral practices (i.e., selection, accommodation, performance management, training and development, and knowledge transfer and mentoring), whereas one only relates to age-specific practices (i.e., exit and retention). We make recommendations for organizations to effectively design and implement each of these HRM practices.