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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.

The literature on equality, diversity, and inclusion in organizational and societal contexts has grown in leaps and bounds over the last two decades or so. Our understanding of these phenomena in a global context is, however, limited, as attention has mostly been paid to the United States and other Western countries. This chapter aims to address this gap by exploring workplace diversity in Nigeria, an under-researched context, characterized by high diversity and low inclusion. Our goal is to understand the factors that shape diversity management operating in such a challenging context and to analyze the problems and prospects of building a highly diverse and inclusive environment.

Using a case study approach, the chapter analyzes four dimensions of equality and diversity (ethnic, religious, age, and HIV/AIDS) across four organizations.

This exploratory study highlights the challenges of building a diverse and inclusive workplace in a weak institutional environment. We identify competing logics of managing diversity in Nigeria: institutionalizing ethnic representation vs building a meritocracy (ethnic), maintaining religious neutrality vs promoting religious freedom (religion), keeping the elder tradition vs harnessing the power of youth (age), and managing safety and reputation vs providing employment security (HIV/AIDS).

This study sheds light on the importance of underlying thoughts on the effectiveness of diversity policies and argues that managers and organizations need to know how to balance competing logics and manage paradox effectively. It accentuates the importance of the national institutional environment in shaping diversity practices and provides insights for practitioners and policymakers.

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.

We study the relationship between firms’ top management teams (TMT) and internationalization complexity. We consider the effect of three different sets of TMT characteristics – international business orientation intensity, education intensity, and team diversity – on three different and increasingly complex facets of internationalization - international markets intensity, international operations intensity and international country diversity. We argue that more international, highly-educated and diverse TMTs are better able to face the complexity derived from international competition. The results of our empirical analysis show that TMTs having foreign managers or managers with international experience are more likely to be in charge of firms facing higher international operations intensity. Conversely, more educated and more diverse TMTs are associated with complexity deriving from international diversification.

Meetings are conducted by increasingly age-diverse participant groups as the workforces in most industrialized economies are aging due to demographic change. There are at least three reasons why meetings constitute a particularly interesting environment to study intergenerational learning processes, defined as individuals’ joint construction of knowledge through an exchange of information with one or more individuals from different age groups. First, meetings allow us to observe a wide variety of interactions that may foster or inhibit intergenerational learning. Second, the interactions taking place in meetings reflect general organizational practices as well as social exchange and age norms. As such, meetings offer a view through the magnifying glass at the age-inclusive or age-discriminating organizational culture which is interwoven with the engagement of different generations in intergenerational learning processes. Third, organizational members use meetings as an arena for strategic interactions to negotiate their current and future status by positioning themselves in relation to their colleagues through social comparisons. This chapter particularly focuses on the latter topic and develops a conceptual model outlining the motivational and emotional coˇnsequences as well as antecedents that link social comparison processes in meetings to intergenerational learning outcomes of participants from different age groups.

The popular press often touts workforce demographic diversity as profit enhancing because it may reduce the firm's communication costs with particular segments of customers or yield greater team problem-solving abilities. On the other hand, diversity also may raise communication costs within teams, thereby retarding problem solving and lowering productivity. Unfortunately, there is little empirical research that disentangles the above countervailing effects. Diversity in ability enhances the team productivity if there is significant mutual learning and collaboration within the team, while demographic diversity may harm productivity by making learning and peer pressure less effective and increasing team-member turnover. We evaluate these propositions using a novel panel data from a garment plant that shifted from individual piece rate to group piece rate production over three years. Because we observe individual productivity data, we are able to econometrically distinguish between the impacts of diversity in worker abilities and demographic diversity. Teams with more heterogeneous worker abilities are more productive at the plant. Holding the distribution of team ability constant, teams composed of only one ethnicity (Hispanic workers in our case) are more productive, but this finding does not hold for marginal changes in team composition. We find little evidence that workers prefer to be segregated; demographically diverse teams are no more likely to dissolve, holding team productivity (and hence pay) constant, than homogeneous teams.

Although some researchers have recognized that context can play an important role in explaining the mixed findings of past diversity research, to date a comprehensive framework for specifying these contextual influences has been lacking. In order to address this gap, we propose a framework for future research that incorporates contextual variables at extra-organizational, organizational, and team levels. We consider how these various aspects of diversity influence categorization-based or elaboration-based diversity outcomes. We also present findings of a literature review that identifies aspects of diversity context that have received attention directly or indirectly in research conducted between 1999 and 2007.