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The purpose of this study is to incorporate aspects of existing research to develop a model of hospitality students’ willingness to work with older adults. It evaluates whether the addition of multi-age perspective (MAP), a concept adapted from multi-cultural literature which addresses perceptions of different age groups, and separating attitudes into favorable and unfavorable constructs provide better predictive power than previous models.

A survey combining various measures suggested from the literature was conducted electronically with hospitality students from five US universities.

Factor analysis and structural equation modeling resulted in a model of the relationships between six latent constructs: contact quality, aging anxiety, MAP, unfavorable attitude, favorable attitude and willingness to work with older adults. While MAP and contact quality significantly influenced the respondents’ unfavorable and favorable attitudes, aging anxiety only affected their unfavorable attitude. Respondents’ MAP was the strongest antecedent for willingness to work with older adults, followed by favorable attitude and unfavorable attitude.

The research investigated the beliefs of hospitality students studying in the USA and may not be representative of all younger hospitality workers and those in other countries.

Incorporating MAP into both educational and business contexts through methods such as intergenerational service learning, leadership commitment to age-diversity and reverse mentoring will facilitate cooperation and improved relations among younger and older hospitality workers.

This study is the first to apply the construct of MAP to hospitality and to separate the constructs of the influence of unfavorable attitudes from that of favorable attitudes.

The purpose of this article is to understand how academics in management deal with the concept of generation in the workplace. We begin by conducting an interdisciplinary literature analysis, thereby elaborating a conceptual framework concerning generational diversity. This framework consists of four levels of analysis (society, career, organisation and occupation) and three dimensions (age, cohort and event/period). We then conduct a meta-analysis using this conceptual framework to analyse papers from the management field. The results from this analysis reveal the existence of a diversity of generational approaches, which focus on the dimensions of age and cohort on a societal level. Four factors seem to explain these results: the recent de-synchronisation of generational dimensions and levels, the novelty of theoretical models, the amplification of stereotypes by mass media and the methodologies employed by researchers. In sum, this article contributes to a more realistic view of generational diversity in the workplace for both academics and practitioners.

Every employee embodies manifestations of every demographic that attach to him or her different minority and majority statuses at the same time. As these statuses are often related to organizational hierarchies, employees frequently hold positions of dominance and subordination at the same time. Thus, a given individual’s coping strategies (or coping behavior) in terms of minority stress due to organizational processes of hierarchization, marginalization, and discrimination, are very often a simultaneous coping in terms of more than one demographic. Research on minority stress mostly focuses on single demographics representing only single facets of workforce diversity. By integrating the demographics of age, disability status, nationality, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and religion into one framework, the intersectional model proposed in this chapter broadens the perspective on minorities and related minority stress in the workplace. It is shown that coping with minority stress because of one demographic must always be interpreted in relation to the other demographics. The manifestation of one demographic can limit or broaden one’s coping resources for coping with minority stress because of another dimension. Thus, the manifestation of one demographic can determine the coping opportunities and coping behavior one applies to situations because of the minority status of another demographic. This coping behavior can include disclosure decisions about invisible demographics. Therefore, organizational interventions aiming to create a supportive workplace environment and equal opportunities for every employee (e.g., diversity management approaches) should include more demographics instead of focusing only on few.

The demographic shift and the rapid rate of innovations put age and employability high on policy makers’ and human resource managers’ agenda. However, the authors do not sufficiently understand the link between these concepts. The authors set out to investigate the relationship between age and employability and aim to identify motivational mediators of this relationship. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the roles of future time perspective and goal orientation.

The authors conducted quantitative, cross-sectional survey research (n=282) in three Dutch and Austrian organizations. The authors used structural equation modeling to investigate the relationships between chronological age, future time perspective, goal orientations, and employability.

Future time perspective and goal orientation strongly relate to employability. The authors found indirect relationships between age and employability via perceived remaining opportunities.

The results question the often simplistic use of chronological age in employability and human resource management research. Therefore, the authors call for more research to investigate the relationship between age and employability more deeply.

The findings contribute new insights for the career development issues of an increasingly older workforce. This shifts the focus from age, a factor outside our control, to motivation.

This study contributes evidence for the relationships of chronological age, future time perspective, and goal orientation with employability. It extends literature by criticizing the prevalent use of chronological age and investigating mediation effects.

This study aims to investigate the impacts of pandemic-related media coverage on younger hospitality and tourism employees’ ageist attitudes toward older people by applying the media priming theory and the terror management theory.

This study takes a mixed-method approach through an online survey. A total of 416 usable responses are collected from current US hospitality and tourism employees under 55 years. Qualitative data were analyzed using word cloud. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is then used to test the hypothesized model.

The study’s results show that younger employees' cognitive reaction negatively affects aging anxiety and intergenerational tension, which subsequently influence their willingness to work with older people. Negative media-induced emotions are positively associated with aging anxiety, whereas positive emotions exert no significant impact. Intergenerational contact frequency moderates the effect of intergenerational tension on younger employees’ willingness to work with older people.

This study’s findings contribute to the hospitality and tourism workforce literature by considering the priming effects of media coverage on younger employees’ attitudes toward self-aging and the older group. This study also offers managerial insights on developing effective age-inclusion interventions to reduce workplace ageism in the post-pandemic era.

Existing hospitality and tourism studies on older workers are scant and largely descriptive. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study that assesses the effects of pandemic-related media coverage on workplace ageism toward older people among the current hospitality and tourism workforce.