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This paper aims to warn that the short-term cost-cutting measure of laying off older employees can result in long-term problems. It stresses the value that older employees can add to organizations and offers insights on what employers should consider when trying to retain and attract older employees.

The paper combines the personal experience of a consultant whose employees are all over the age of 50 bolstered by surveys noting what older employees want and expect in the workplace.

The paper concludes that older employees help companies save money by sharing their wealth of experience and helping younger employees avoid mistakes they have made or witnessed in their own careers. The paper argues that to retain and attract the best older employees, companies need to be flexible, provide good compensation and offer work that is interesting and meaningful. Just like younger employees, many older employees want companies that provide time-off for family commitments and offer opportunities for advancement.

This paper goes beyond detailing the value of older employees, in terms of knowledge, loyalty and connections and offers tips on how to attract and retain older employees from someone who successfully does so in his own business.

We develop a conceptual model, based on person-environment fit theory, which explains how employee age affects occupational strain and well-being. We begin by explaining how age directly affects different dimensions of objective and subjective P-E fit. Next, we illustrate how age can moderate the relationship between objective P-E fit and subjective P-E fit. Third, we discuss how age can moderate the relationships between P-E fit, on one hand, and occupational strain and well-being on the other. Fourth, we explain how age can impact occupational strain and well-being directly independent of P-E fit. The chapter concludes with implications for future research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of how portrayals of older employees in mass media messages can help combating stereotypical beliefs on their employability.

The authors conducted a systematic review of empirical studies on mass media portrayals of older employees in order to show what these reveal about the ways in which their employment status, occupation, job type, or work setting is portrayed. The approach builds upon theory on media portrayals, media effects, and stereotypes of older workers’ employability.

This study shows that older employees in media portrayals, when present at all, are relatively often shown in higher-level professional roles, herewith overall, depicting an image that is positive, yet differs from stereotypical beliefs on their employability that are prevalent in working organizations.

Further empirical work is needed to more safely conclude on the prevalence of age-related portrayals of work and employment in mass media. In addition, longitudinal research is called for in order to better understand the possible causes for the way in which older employees are portrayed, as well as effects of age-related stereotyping in mass media and corporate communication outlets over time.

This research sparks ideas about how new portrayals of older employees in mass media and corporate communication outlets can contribute to novel approaches to managing an aging and multi-generational workforce.

This study shows how working organizations can make use of the positive and powerful media portrayals of older employees, in order to activate normal and non-ageist behaviors toward them, and herewith, to increase their life-long employability.

This study highlights the role of media portrayals of older employees in combating stereotypes about their employability.

Employees older than 55 years of age have a much lower share in training than other employees. The purpose of this paper is to propose that one of the reasons for this phenomenon that has not been taken into account so far is that their training is less effective.

This paper shows that training of older employees indeed is less effective in the self-assessment of training participants. Training effectiveness is measured with respect to key dimensions such as career development, earnings, adoption of new skills, flexibility or job security. Besides age a broad range of explanatory variables is included as covariates in a large linked employer-employee data set.

The paper finds that main reason for the differences in training effectiveness during the life cycle is that firms do not take into account differences in training motivation. Older employees get higher returns from informal and directly relevant training and from training contents that can be mainly tackled by crystallised abilities. Training incidence in the more effective training forms is, however, not higher for older employees. Given that other decisive variables on self-assessed effectiveness such as training duration, financing and initiative are not sensitive to age, the wrong allocation of training contents and training forms therefore is the critical explanation for the lower effectiveness of training.

This paper therefore shows to human resource managers why old employees rate training effectiveness lower and indicates what can be done in order to improve training effectiveness of old employees. It uses a large and detailed data set entailing more than 6,000 employees from about 150 establishments.

This paper aims to examine the design and implementation of age-related human resource (HR) practices across organizations located in the institutional contexts of the under-researched emerging market economy of Thailand.

A cross-case analysis of five organizations is conducted across industries. The empirical evidence in this paper draws on semistructured interviews and focus groups with older workers of each organization, semistructured interviews with top managers and/or HR managers of each organization, field visits to each organization located in Bangkok and other provinces in Thailand and a review of archival documents and Web-based resources.

This paper proposes that firms design and implement various age-related HR practices, including the extension of the retirement age, financial planning facilitation, the bundling of maintenance and the bundling of utilization, to ensure that older workers in their firms maintain their current level of functioning to cope with the problem of skill shortage in the Thai labor market, have sufficient savings after retirement to respond to the “productivist informal security” welfare state regime and return to previous levels of functioning after facing losses in their careers.

Due to the fact that this research is based on case studies of age-related HR practices in five firms across industries in Thailand, the findings may not be generalizable to all other firms across countries. Rather, the aim of this paper is to enrich the discussion regarding the design and implementation of age-related HR practices in organizations. Another limitation of this research is that it does not include firms located in several industries, such as the financial services industry and the education industry. Future research may explore age-related HR practices in organizations located in these industries. Moreover, quantitative studies using large samples of firms across industries might also be useful for fostering an in-depth understanding of the design and implementation of age-related HR practices in organizations.

This paper provides practical implications for top managers and/or HR managers of firms in Thailand and other emerging market economies. That said, these top managers and/or HR managers can implement age-related HR practices to respond to the problem of skill shortage in the labor market, ensure that older workers have sufficient savings after retirement and help older workers return to previous levels of functioning after facing deterioration in health conditions and/or losses in their careers.

This paper provides policy implications for the government and/or relevant public agencies of Thailand and other emerging market economies that still face a severe skill shortage problem. Older workers who possess tacit knowledge and valuable experience and are still healthy can be considered excellent alternates for firms to help alleviate the skill shortage problem in the labor market. However, firms should implement age-related HR practices to retain this group of employees overtime.

This paper contributes to the literature on comparative institutionalism and human resource management, specifically regarding age-related HR practices, in the following ways. First, this paper examines how firms design and implement age-related HR practices to respond to the country’s macro-level institutions. Additionally, in this paper, the author triangulates the findings from older workers with those from employers to ensure that actual HR practices perceived by older workers are in line with HR practices perceived by top managers and/or HR managers. Moreover, the literature on age-related HR practices has likely overlooked emerging market economies, including the under-researched country of Thailand, because most studies in this area have focused on developed economies. Therefore, the findings in this paper provide an in-depth analysis of the design and implementation of age-related HR practices across firms located in the emerging market economy of Thailand to respond to the national institutional context.

Adaptation to the requirements of digital economy is especially difficult for older workers, which is a challenge for today’s organizations due to workforce shrinking and ageing. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how it is possible to develop older employees’ potential in technology use in the business environment.

The authors examined how employees at various age perceive barriers during enterprise system (ES) adoption and use. This exploratory study is based on grounded theory and draws from the opinions of 187 Polish ES practitioners.

With age, emphasis on employees’ perception of mandatory ICT implementation projects is shifting from technology to people-related considerations. For older employees, job security and workload appear the most critical issues in such projects. Age-diverse collaboration appears necessary to address the problems posed by technology-related and demographic changes.

The findings imply that incorporating multiple stakeholder perspectives and age-related considerations into research on ICT adoption appears essential.

ICT adoption in the business environment can be successfully supported by age-balanced team building, cooperation between younger and older employees, and age-adjusted change management initiatives.

Supporting older employees during the implementation of mandatory business software should embrace reducing their negative attitudes to ICT-induced change by minimizing their perception of job insecurity.

Unlike many prior studies, the current research places age in the central role and discusses not only how it is possible to support older employees, but also how to leverage their potential in the process of ICT adoption and use in a mandatory setting.

Interest in older employees increases in times of population ageing. Previous research exploring the situation has underlined older employees' struggle with workplace changes. However, it has not explored their master narrative – the socially shared narrative about older employees that steers behaviour. This study explores this narrative and its differences across changing workplaces. It draws on Lyotard's suggestion that master narratives disintegrate in post-modern societies.

This study conducts focus groups among older Finnish employees of an airline, postal service and social care. These groups experienced different kinds of workplace changes, namely mass layoffs, digitalisation and restructuring. The focus groups highlight the individuals' shared narratives, thereby pinpointing the master narrative.

The master narrative describes how simultaneous changes at the workplace and in their health lead older employees to look for ways to exit their jobs. This narrative is largely stable across workplaces, showing no disintegration but some variation.

This is the first study on the master narrative of older employees and its disintegration. To the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first study to use focus groups to explore a master narrative.

Research on agile software development (ASD) has so far primarily focused on processes and tools. Recently, researchers have started to investigate the social dimensions of ASD. The authors contribute to this and examine the largely invisible psychological factor of age stereotypes as one important social dimension of ASD. Driven by demographic change, employees of different age groups will need to work closely together in ASD in the future. However, age stereotypes can hinder many aspects of communication, cooperation and coordination in these self-managed teams. The purpose of this paper is to identify and differentiate age stereotypes in ASD.

A quantitative survey at the individual level was conducted with 464 employees in two software development companies. The authors developed an age stereotype model for ASD and developed two scales to measure performance expectations (PEs) in ASD.

Employees in ASD show a bias in general PEs, favoring middle-aged employees over both younger and older employees. The perceived PE of a developer decreases over working life. Furthermore, the data show a complex interplay of age and job role in both the research participants and the group evaluated. Younger developers hold the strongest negative age stereotypes and older developers suffer most from stereotypes.

Management should enact formal or informal measures against stereotypes when an older or younger employee joins a team of members of other age groups, or when a new team is formed. In addition, the authors propose human resources to create permeable career paths.

The study extends the stereotype content model by adding additional age groups and including job role as a moderating variable. It identifies obstacles in daily employee interactions in agile development, and proposes ways of incorporating invisible psychological aspects in ASD-specific theories.

This paper seeks to examine the perception of young employees on working relationships satisfaction with communicative teamwork, mutual learning, participative decision making, and communicating feedback of the older employees in higher learning institutions in Malaysia.

A specially‐constructed questionnaire was developed for data collection. A total of 575 employees in five Malaysian universities in the Klang Valley participated in the study.

Young employees have positive teamwork relationships with the older employees. They learned a lot from the older employees as the older employees are helpful in sharing their experiences in decision making. At the same time, the young employees receive positive feedback from the older employees. However, the older employees hardly compliment the young employees for their achievements.

The current findings provide implications for future organisational and intergenerational research since most communication investigations are Western‐biased.

The findings can help both the older and the young employees have a better understanding of communication at workplace. Each generation is shaped by its experiences, which brings a variety of strengths to the workforce.

This study is unique because it examines an important issue which very little study has been conducted on the issue; the intergenerational communication in organisational setting in Asian perspectives.