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Acknowledging that only examining the main effects of diversity may be limiting, the authors explore integrating van Knippenberg et al.'s (2004) categorization–elaboration model (CEM) of workgroup diversity as a linchpin in the relationship between empowering leadership and performance in age-diverse work groups. While prior research has focused almost exclusively on the impact of transformational leadership in diverse contexts, few studies have found the positive effects of transformational leadership to be diminished in certain age-diverse contexts. Consequently, the authors investigate whether empowering leadership may be a better approach in this context due to its emphasis on accommodating and participative behaviors.

Using survey data gathered from work group members across a wide array of industries (N = 214), the authors test for the moderating effects of empowering leadership on the relationship between age diversity and work group performance and its indirect relationship via information elaboration (while controlling for transformational leadership).

Empowering leadership positively moderated the direct relationship between age diversity and work group performance and the indirect relationship via information elaboration, whereas transformational leadership had the opposite effect. “Coaching” and “showing concern/interacting with the team” drove the positive effects of empowering leadership, and “personal recognition” and “intellectual stimulation” predicted the negative effects of transformational leadership.

This research offers insights into how managers can lead age-diverse work groups more effectively (i.e. by utilizing an empowering as opposed to a transformational leadership approach, with a particular emphasis on “coaching” and “showing concern/interacting with the team” behaviors).

The study identifies an “alternative” moderating contingency to the age diversity–performance relationship (empowering leadership).

The purpose of this paper is to help organizations capitalize on the potential advantages of age diversity by offering insight into two new moderators in the age diversity, work group performance relationship – status congruity and cognition-based trust.

The authors surveyed 197 employees and 56 supervisors across 59 work groups to test for the moderating effects of status congruity and cognition-based trust on the age diversity, work group performance relationship.

The results demonstrated, on the one hand, that under conditions of status congruity (i.e. when there were high levels of perceived status legitimacy and veridicality) and/or when perceptions of cognition-based trust were high within the group, the relationship between age diversity and work group performance was positive. On the other hand, under conditions of status incongruity and/or low levels of cognition-based trust, this relationship was negative.

The findings contribute to the literature by being the first to provide empirical evidence for the theorized effects of status on the performance of age-diverse work groups and also by demonstrating the effects of cognition-based trust in a new context – age-diverse work groups.

Arising from the study’s findings are several strategies, which are expected to help organizations enhance perceptions of status congruity and/or trust and ultimately the performance of their age-diverse work groups.

The paper is the first to empirically demonstrate the moderating effects of status congruity and cognition-based trust on the age diversity, work group performance relationship. The study also establishes important distinctions between the effects of objective status differences vs status perceptions.

Important demographic changes are causing organizations and teams to become increasingly age-diverse. Because knowledge sharing is critical to organizations’ long-term sustainability and success, both researchers and practitioners face a strategic dilemma: namely, finding ways to cultivate greater knowledge sharing among different age cohorts.

In this chapter, we claim that age diversity adds relevant opportunities and distinct challenges. On one hand, it increases demands for effective knowledge sharing: Employees of different ages are likely to hold diverse knowledge and capabilities that may be lost and/or poorly exploited if they are not effectively shared. On the other hand, age differences can activate age-related stereotypes and foster the formation of age subgroups, which can hamper social integration, communication, and ultimately, knowledge sharing.

Building on these insights, this chapter looks at the role of the human resource management (HRM) system as a key facilitator of effective knowledge sharing in age-diverse organizations. To this end, the chapter focuses on HR planning, training and development, performance appraisal, and reward systems, each of which can be used to develop the motivations, norms, and accountability structures that encourage employees of different ages to bridge their differences and integrate their unique perspectives and knowledge. This chapter suggests ways of tailoring HRM practices to unlock the benefits of age diversity, which may help organizations exploit and capitalize on the knowledge-based resources held by their younger and older employees.

Past research on how to compose a team is ambiguous, especially with respect to diversity dimensions. The authors argue that previous inconsistencies in results have arisen for two main reasons. First, there is a lack of clarity about the concept of age diversity, as age separation, age variety and age disparity are frequently used synonymously, but capture very different aspects of diversity. Second, in many research settings, age and tenure diversity have been intertwined. When staffing teams, many staff managers ask for staffing advise concerning staff diversity in order to enhance efficiency. This staffing problem is mainly a question how homogeneous and heterogeneous teams should be composed. In this paper, the authors capture both – age and tenure diversity – as well as their interaction and argue that age separation and tenure variety are most likely to affect team performance in a routine task. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors are testing the hypothesis using rich quantitative field data from a steel company.

The results show that age separation decreases performance while tenure variety increases performance. Moreover, the beneficial effects of tenure variety cannot arise when age separation is too large.

The authors show that diversity research is very sensitive to the operationalization of diversity.

Managers can benefit from the study by learning how to optimally staff teams: while age diversity should be low, tenure diversity can be high.

Due to the unique data set, the authors can separate the influence of tenure and age diversity.

The age diversity climate construct is gaining greater attention in the organizational literature due to the demographic changes in the workplace. While the few existing studies on age diversity climate (ADC) are rather encouraging, this construct is still at an early stage of conceptual and operational development. This chapter helps to advance this field of research by analyzing the conceptual issues stemming from the theoretical definition and empirical measurement of the ADC construct. We first review and compare ADC with other age-focused climate concepts, highlighting overlapping and diverging factors regarding their conceptual framework and operationalization. Subsequently, we consider several open issues related to the operationalization of ADC, including the level of analysis, the choice of referent, and the dimensions of analysis. We conclude the chapter by outlining possibilities for future research on ADC.

We aim to explore whether demographic groups of varying status positions differ in terms of their perception of work group members’ openness to deep-level and surface-level diversity. We also explore the effect that task group conflict and relational group conflict have on perceptions of openness to diversity.

Quantitative analysis of responses from 489 academics in multicultural university departments is applied. A comparison is made of different demographic groups based on age, nationality, and seniority with regard to perceptions of work group members’ openness to diversity. Specifically, we focused on perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarity (deep-level) and openness to visible dissimilarity (surface-level).

We found that there are indeed differences between demographic groups with regard to perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarities. No significant differences could be found in relation to openness to visual dissimilarities for any of the demographic sub-samples. We also found that there were differential effects of contextual adverse circumstances in the form of relational group conflict and task group conflict on the perceptions of the two types of work group openness to diversity.

The knowledge that different demographical groups perceive their peers’ openness to diversity differently is an important insight when decisions regarding diversity issues have to be taken.

Few studies have focused on perceptions of diversity. This is an important omission because individuals often act upon their perceptions, rather than on objective reality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which negative age-based metastereotypes mediate the relationship between the representation of older workers and two forms of stereotype threat in the workplace: own-reputation and group-reputation. Adopting a social identity perspective, this paper also explores whether age diversity beliefs moderate the relationship between negative age-based metastereotypes and stereotype threats.

A cross-sectional design was adopted with bootstrapped mediation and moderation analyses. The data were collected from 567 older workers working in 15 manufacturing companies.

The analyses provide support for partial mediation and for a moderation effect of age diversity beliefs in the relationship between negative age-based metastereotypes and own-reputation threat. The results hold while controlling for age, objective organizational age diversity, and organizational tenure.

The limitations of this study include its cross-sectional nature and the need for further work regarding older workers’ metastereotypes about middle-aged workers.

For stereotype threat interventions to be effective they must identify beforehand the target and the source of the threat. Moreover, interventions should aim for the development of a sense of identity on the organization as it may pave the way for members of different age groups to build bonds and for intergenerational boundaries to be blurred.

This paper contributes to the literature by showing the importance of negative age-based metastereotypes in workplace age dynamics. It also provides further support for a multi-threat approach to the experience of age-based stereotype threats in the workplace.

Successful developers need to manage a large number of cooperation partners and find innovative solutions for specific tasks, as each real estate project is somehow unique. Thus, the question arises as to whether intelligent group formation for real estate development calls for more or rather less diverse project groups.

This paper aims to test the impact of group diversity on overall group performance with a unique data set. The authors collected the results of 150 project assignments from real estate executive education students at the IREBS Real Estate Academy from 2010 until 2016.

The authors find that group results were impacted positively for groups with disparity in work experience and ability. Differences in sex and age did not yield any measurable impact, neither positive nor negative.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the relationship between work group diversity and group performance was tested for real estate educational projects. The authors believe that the results are highly relevant for all university work, for which teams have to cooperate on complex rather than basic assignments and problems. Moreover, they are the first to develop a framework that combines diversity theories with a clear distinction between three diversity concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether there is some common pattern between organizations that give primacy either to younger workforce or to older one.

It depicts the empirical evidence of eight case studies and some theoretical contributions thereof. All case units are considered outstanding employers in Brazil business scenario, given the magnitude of their human resource (HR) feats and society acknowledgements. Taken together, they are eight representative cases derived from Época magazine and Great Place to Work® Institute 2013 list.

Case units exhibited strongest group age preferences on an ongoing basis. Rather, they depicted an unbalanced labor force demographic age frame for the sake of their own HR choices. As a result, they all could be labeled as age bias companies in a more or less degree. Given that their options (i.e. percentage of preferences) have been somewhat consistent during the period of analysis, one may therefore infer that such options have been buttressed by the leadership held values. Surprisingly, all case units had not provided logical arguments or wise explanations in light of their decisions related to it. Moreover, the companies had not offered compelling evidence that they were implementing robust diversity and inclusion polices aiming to provide an equalitarian treatment to all age groups or that they were at least paying attention to these issues in a coherent form. In fact, they have been astonishingly silent on these matters.

The purposeful sample strategy that was carried out in this study does not permit that the results be generalized. Actually, they are derived from only a specific cohort of companies – to some extent, they are outliers in the list of the best organizations to work for in Brazil – that has been noticeable for their extreme workforce age options.

The case units sample showed to have huge difficulties to mitigate organizational age bias effects in their headcount. In fact, the majority of the case units that were perused demonstrated to give a consistent priority for either having either younger workforce or older one.

Overall, it is expected that this study may contribute to diversity management theory by bringing further knowledge about how some of the best organizations to work for in Brazil implement their workforce demographic age policies.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.