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Social norms about the timing of retirement and stereotypes about qualities of younger and older workers are pervasive, but it is unclear how they relate to employers’ ageist preferences. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of employers’ retirement age norms and age-related stereotypes on their preferences for younger or older workers in three types of employment practices: hiring a new employee; offering training; and offering a permanent contract.

Survey data from 960 Dutch employers from 2017 are analysed to study employers’ preferences for younger or older workers. Effects of organisations’ and managers’ characteristics, retirement age norms and stereotypes are estimated with multinomial logistic regression analyses.

Many employers have a strong preference for younger workers, especially when hiring a new employee, while preferences for older workers are highly uncommon. Higher retirement age norms of employers are related to a lower preference for younger workers in all employment decisions. When employers are more positive about older workers’ soft qualities (such as reliability and social skills), but not about their hard qualities (such as their physical capacity and willingness to learn), they rate older workers relatively more favourable for hiring and offering training, but not for providing a permanent contract.

This is one of the first studies to estimate the effects of retirement age norms and age-related stereotypes on ageist preferences for a diverse set of employment practices.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the transitional employment (TE) aspirations and training and development needs of older and younger workers at risk of early retirement due to limited education and/or employment in blue‐collar (BC) occupations.

A computer‐based methodology is used to evaluate the demographic effects of gender, education level, and occupation group on aspirations pertaining to TE and training and development in a sample of over 1,000 local government employees.

Older BC, secondary school‐educated and younger workers are less interested in TE than older workers with higher levels of education or from white‐collar backgrounds. The early retirement risk factors of BC work and secondary school education had a more limited effect on perceived training and development needs for older workers. However, for younger workers, these risk factors provided the impetus to undertake training to move into less physically demanding or more challenging roles as their careers progressed.

Via the identification of education level and occupation types groups' TE aspirations and perceptions of preparatory training and development within younger and older cohorts, long‐term strategies to develop and retain staff may be formulated.

Past studies of TE have rarely included younger workers or older workers at risk of early retirement. Preparatory training and development for TE roles has not been considered in the literature.

This paper aimed to investigate how older and younger workers are perceived in terms of Big Five personality and task and contextual performance. Based on the intergroup bias phenomenon, the authors also examined whether respondent age would moderate these effects.

Participants (n=155) completed a paper survey in which they were randomly assigned to rate either a “typical” younger employee or a “typical” older employee. They filled out questionnaires containing measures of perceived personality factors and perceived job performance of an older or younger worker.

As predicted, older and younger workers were perceived differently in terms of certain Big Five personality factors and organizational citizenship behavior. These perceived differences generally reflected actual age-related differences on these variables. However, respondents' age moderated many of these effects, such that respondents' perceptions favored their own age group.

These studies illustrate that dimensions such as perceived Big Five personality and job performance may be useful for examining workplace age stereotypes. They also illustrate that respondent age may affect these perceptions of older and younger workers.

This study goes beyond previous studies focused on the examination of general age bias. Indeed, this is the first study that examines perceptions of personality and performance dimensions of older and younger workers in a field setting. Such perceptions may have an impact on the decisions that managers make regarding older and younger workers (e.g. selection, promotions).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate younger workers’ perceptions of older colleagues, including whether there is evidence of ageism.

Convenience sampling was used to recruit ten individuals who were both below the age of 35 and employed at a multigenerational workplace in England. The study is qualitative, involving semi-structured interviews that were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis.

This study found that whilst some younger employees valued working with older colleagues as they believe that their differing characteristics are complementary, others felt that it leads to intergenerational conflict due to contrasting approaches towards work. Positive perceptions of older workers included their increased knowledge and experience, reliability and better social skills; however, ageism was also prevalent, such as the perception of older workers as resistant to change, slower at using technology and lacking the drive to progress. This study also provided evidence for the socioemotional selectivity and social identity theories.

This study has a small sample size and participants were only recruited from London.

In order to create working environments that are conducive to the well-being of employees of all ages, organisations should place an emphasis on reducing intergenerational tension. This could be achieved by team building sessions that provide an opportunity for individuals to understand generational differences.

There is minimal evidence from the UK focussing on the perceptions of specifically younger workers towards older colleagues and the basis of their attitudes. Only by gaining an insight into their attitudes and the reasoning behind them, can efforts be made to decrease ageism.

To explore whether the ages of human resources (HR) managers has an impact on their perceptions of the qualities/characteristics of older and younger workers (i.e., manager attitudes) and on the implementation of age management initiatives to the benefit of older workers (i.e., manager behaviors). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Based on theories concerning the origins of stereotypes and the concept of “in-group bias”, three hypotheses were tested on a sample of HR managers from 516 Italian companies extracted from the Gfk Eurisko database by using factor analyses and bivariate and multivariate tools.

The age of an HR manager seems to influence his/her attitudes towards older and younger workers, because HR managers judge workers of a similar age to them more positively. In contrast, the age of an HR manager does not seem to play a particular role in the implementation of age management initiatives. In the companies considered, however, there is a tendency to adopt early retirement schemes when the HR managers concerned are younger, while in general there is a tendency to implement age management initiatives and show a greater appreciation of older workers in larger companies.

The implementation of age management initiatives to the benefit of older workers may improve HR managers ' perceptions of those workers ' positive qualities. Furthermore, specific training may help HR managers recognize that both younger and older workers have useful albeit different strengths.

This study provides new empirical evidence from the Italian context on the largely under-investigated issue of the role played by age in shaping HR managers ' attitudes towards older workers, and age management policies in particular.

With age diversity in the workplace becoming increasingly prevalent, the conflict between younger and older workers can be pervasive because of their increased interpersonal tensions from heterogeneous interactions. Adopting an identity-based approach, this study aims to examine the causes, underlying mechanisms and specific strategies used to manage such conflict. It was hypothesized that there is an interaction effect between age-group identification and organizational identification on conflict strategies and that this relationship can be explained by the mediating role of motivational goal orientation.

A total of 380 clerical workers in Hong Kong, aged 19–65, responded to two hypothetical scenarios about conflict with a younger and an older worker using a structured questionnaire on social identity, motivational goal orientation and conflict strategies. Moderated mediation analyzes were performed to test the hypothesized conditional indirect effects.

Results showed that workers who identified with the organization emphasized less on independent goals (with a younger opposing party) and more on cooperative goals (with an older opposing party) when they did not perceive an age-group differentiation, and thus, they were more likely to respond in a way that de-escalates the conflict, including the use of integrating, obliging and compromising strategies.

Extending age-related conflict research beyond identifying generational differences, this study highlights the role of social identity and suggests that employers and managers should strengthen employees’ organizational identification and build a fair work environment that facilitates positive interaction between younger and older workers.

The aging of the population is changing the composition of the workforce in most developed countries. With increasingly older and age-diverse workforces, organizations need to redesign jobs to keep their workers healthy, happy and productive across the lifespan. In the current research, the authors integrate socioemotional selectivity theory and selection, optimization and compensation theory with job design to investigate how certain job characteristics influence the work engagement of older and younger workers.

In a two-wave survey with age-diverse employees from multiple organizations (N = 372), the authors explore how autonomy and feedback contribute to the engagement of older and younger workers, depending on levels of task variety.

In the case of older workers the relationships between autonomy and engagement, and feedback and engagement are positive when task variety is low but non-significant when task variety is high. Conversely, in the case of younger workers the relationships between autonomy and engagement, and feedback and engagement are positive when task variety is high but non-significant when task variety is low.

The research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on aging and work, particularly the lifespan perspective on job design. Nonetheless, the correlational design warrants caution about drawing causal inferences.

The findings inform managers on how to combine autonomy, feedback and task variety to design jobs that can engage the multi-age workforce.

The research is among the first to investigate the combined effects of different job characteristics on age-diverse employees' engagement at work.

Advancing knowledge about effectively managing the ageing workforce and ensuring economic sustainability for a growing retired cohort is a recognised priority for organisational health researchers, employers and governments. The purpose of this paper is to test social perceptions that older workers' cognitive performance and job attitudes compare adversely to their younger colleagues.

The research assessed samples of older and younger workers in objective tests of cognitive abilities and subjective job attitudes. An opportunity sampling method was employed to recruit a heterogeneous group of participants in Australia (n=172).

No significant differences in cognitive ability between the groups were identified; older workers were as cognitively skilled for their job as their younger colleagues. No significant group difference for perceptions of social support, job commitment, job satisfaction or turnover intentions was identified.

The cross‐sectional research design adopted by this research prevented a more detailed examination of the data in terms of causal relationships. While the cognitive testing provided objective rather than subjective data and, therefore, is not as susceptible to response biases such as common method variance, the small sample who undertook the cognitive testing is acknowledged as a research limitation.

This research has implications for the reduction in unemployment of older workers and directly addresses the social issues of an ageing labour force.

The paper demonstrates that stereotypical assumptions concerning inadequate performance and low job commitment commonly attributed to older workers are not in fact indicative of all ageing employees.

This study investigates the impact of the increasing proportion of older workers in the workforce by establishing a theoretical framework and estimating the degree of substitutability between them and their younger counterparts.

The first step is to establish a theoretical framework that combines older and younger workers with imperfect substitutability in the production of final goods within an aggregate production function. The author then derives an equation that relates the relative wage, relative supply and elasticity of substitution between the worker types, for use in estimation. Using data from Japan’s Basic Survey on Wage Structure and Population Census from 2010 to 2019 across 47 prefectures, the author estimates the elasticity of substitution between older and younger workers in Japan.

The author finds that workers aged 55 and over and their younger counterparts are gross substitutes, and the estimated elasticity of substitution is in the range of 2.33–2.86. This implies that a 10% increase in the relative number of workers aged 55 and older leads to a fall in their relative wage in the range of 3.5–4.3%. The study estimations suggest that since 2010, there has been a convergence in the relative wage of older workers across Japan’s prefectures.

Understanding the degree of substitutability between older and younger workers is essential for quantitatively assessing the impact of workforce aging, technological advancements and labor policies on the wage distribution. This study estimates the elasticity of substitution between the two worker types based on a theoretical model, and utilizes recent datasets and methodology not adequately addressed in previous literature.

The global trend of an ageing workforce and government policy directions towards reversing early retirement trends raises the issue of the costs to employers of an older workforce. Data on older workers human resources costs are lacking generally in Australia and other countries. This analysis of human resource costs and benefits relies on aggregate Australia national human resources benchmarking data that are applied to older workers. The study is based on the ratio of duration of employment of older workers compared to younger workers and uses this ratio as a multiplier of human resource costs. The analysis considers recruitment, training, absenteeism and work injuries of older compared to younger workers. The analysis found that net benefits occurred through recruitment and training benefits over the costs of absenteeism and work injuries. Further non‐quantified benefits of older workers identified in international case studies are also explained. These quantified and non‐quantified benefits of older workers suggest that identified positive inducements to employers exist which support human resources investments in older workers.