Spotlight on Age‐Diversity Climate: The Impact of Age‐Inclusive HR Practices on Firm‐Level Outcomes

Abstract

This study investigates the emergence and the performance effects of an age-diversity climate at the organizational level of analysis. Building upon Kopelman and colleagues' (Kopelman, Brief, & Guzzo, 1990) climate model of firm productivity as well as Cox's (1994) interactional model of cultural diversity, we hypothesize a positive influence of ageinclusive HR practices on the development of an organization-wide agediversity climate, which in turn should be directly related to collective perceptions of social exchange and indirectly to firm performance and employees' collective turnover intentions. The assumed relationships are tested in a sample of 93 German small and medium-sized companies with 14,260 employees participating. To circumvent common source problems, information for the various constructs was gathered from 6 different sources. To test our assumed relationships, we applied structural equation modeling and executed bootstrapping procedures to test the significance of the indirect effects. We received support for all assumed relationships. The paper concludes with practical recommendations on how to establish and make use of a positive age-diversity climate.

Coping with Demographic Change in Job Markets: How Age Diversity Management Contributes to Organisational Performance

“…Drawing on social exchange theory, we show that organisations signal that they value and care for their employees by introducing the principles of age diversity management in appraisal and compensation policies and practices, which in turn contributes to organisational performance as perceived by HR managers as well as employee productivity measured with objective data. This notion is in line with results from Boehm, Kunze, and Bruch (2014) who find a positive relationship between age-inclusive HR practices and organisational performance, mediated by employees' perceptions of social exchange. Transferring these findings to general diversity management, future studies could integrate employee welfare as a mediator in order to understand how diversity management translates into organisational performance (Guillaume et al, 2014).…”

It matters how old you feel: Antecedents and performance consequences of average relative subjective age in organizations.

“…In particular, we argue that the psychographic measure (Teuscher, 2009) of average work-related meaning is only relevant for the average relative subjective age within a company if age-inclusive HR practices support it. Age-inclusive HR practices are specific HR management practices, which ensure that all employees irrespective of their age develop their knowledge skills and abilities, become equally motivated, and receive the same opportunity to contribute to organizational goals (Boehm et al, 2014). Researchers have shown that such HR practices are related to organizational performance through a positive age-diversity climate as a mediator (Boehm et al, 2014).…”

Diversity Climate in Organizations: Current Wisdom and Domains of Uncertainty

“…First, we review the current wisdom on diversity climate, focusing on field studies wherein general diversity climate was the focal construct. Because general climate has been the predominate subject of diversity climate work, we did not review work on diversity climates targeted toward specific demographic categories such as gender (King, Hebl, George, & Matusik, 2010) or age (Bo¨hm, Kunze, & Bruch, 2014). During the review, we sort studies by levels of analysis, as diversity climate has been studied at the individual (i.e., employee level) and aggregate levels (e.g., business unit, workgroup, and firm levels).…”