Age-Diversity and Inclusion at the Workplace: Implicit and Explicit Attitudes, Personality and Fit

The world’s population is changing rapidly. At the same time older workers are encouraged to continue being professionally active and younger workers face postponed and precarious entry to the world of work. Moreover, there is a growing problem of generational division (e.g., Shore, 2008) and skills shortage (Hertel, van der Heijden, de Lange, & Deller, 2013). Therefore, contemporary policy makers, companies and workers are facing a challenge of building a long-term productive and engaged age-diverse workforce. One way of adressing this issue is studying factors that contribute to age-neutral vs. age-biased evaluations in selection (paper 1) and job performance evaluations (paper 2) or studying the joint effects of age and working environment on work engagement (paper 3). Specifically, paper 1 investigated effects of rater overt-explicit age bias and covert-implicit age bias towards both older to younger workers on resume evaluations of applicants in different age. Paper 2, examined effects of rater conscientiousness on the performance evaluations of younger and older “typical” worker (Study 1) and an actual coworker (Study 2). Third paper, tested the effects of age on the relation between person-environment fit and work engagement.