Leveraging Aging Workforce and Age Diversity to Achieve Organizational Goals: A Human Resource Management Perspective

Abstract

Given the aging trend in the labor force, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of how human resource management (HRM) practices can support the age-diverse workforce and facilitate the maintenance of both younger and older workers’ collective job performance. In this chapter, we propose an HRM perspective to examine how organizations can leverage an aging workforce and age diversity to achieve strategic goals. Specifically, we describe age-specific HRM practices, which are often used to counterbalance traditional stereotypical negative views of older workers. Additionally, given the increasingly popular adoption of a broad work-lifespan view about age management, we also describe age-neutral HRM practices. This view focuses on practices targeted at employees from early- to late-career stages, promoting an understanding of aging as an individual change process in terms of motivation, values, competencies, and behavior. Most of the HRM practices we focus on can be translated into both age-specific and age-neutral practices (i.e., selection, accommodation, performance management, training and development, and knowledge transfer and mentoring), whereas one only relates to age-specific practices (i.e., exit and retention). We make recommendations for organizations to effectively design and implement each of these HRM practices.