How Age Effects Job Performance in the Workplace

How Age Effects Job Performance in the Workplace

By: Alexander Shively

            Job performance is the quality and quantity that is expected from an employee. Age and job performance is judged constantly in the workplace. Many employers feel as if the older an employee gets the more their job performance suffers in the workplace compared to younger more alert workers. The stereotype is that older workers speed; strength, agility, and health greatly affect the performance they have. Employers feel as if young people who are new in the company are able to adapt to the changing work conditions that the economy is pushing for. It is commonly thought of that older workers are no longer assets to the company since they’re basically deteriorating in the eyes of employers but not everyone who is old has health problems or has trouble seeing. The problem is that supervisors are just assuming that if one person has the problem they all will but just because an older worker has health problems at 60 doesn’t mean they all do some never have any health issues until their 80 years old. This assumption can affect a company’s performance in the future. Just because someone is aging doesn’t mean his or her performance is lowering.

Relevance to organizational performance

            Since no matter what we do people will age and people will graduate college employers need to find a way to keep older workers from thinking they aren’t wanted anymore. Companies need to start to pair older workers up with young workers in the workplace on team projects. By doing this is will allow the new employees to learn from the vast knowledge that a long time employees has while the new employee can help keep the older worker up to date with how to use new technology being used in companies. If businesses keep seeing older workers as liabilities them not only will a companies performance suffer but their client lists, and financials will decrease. This is because it is known that older employees usually have bigger clients that sometimes will only work with them that bring in large amounts of money for the company. If a business sees an older worker reaching an age where they think their performance is suffering and let them go sometimes clients will leave the company to follow the employee to a new job which could have a huge affect on a business.

            In the article written about the effect age has on performance in the workplace (Mumtaz, 2010) explains reasons why employers think that older workers are lower workplace performance. It talks about how their resistance to new technology causing them to be less flexible in new working conditions. Citizenship behavior also decreases as age increases because older employees feel like they need to spend more time worrying about their own work to make sure their employers don’t think their performance is decreasing rather then be willing to assist new workers who need help.

Description from the article

            In this article they conducted a study using over 100 groups of individuals with the ages of the people ranging from 18 to 74. This study was performed to measure how work performance is affected by experience compared to age. They conducted the study by asking the individuals supervisors to fill out a questionnaire, which rated their performance. In this study they were able to conclude that the correlations between age and performance drops significantly when experience was controlled. This means that once experience is added into the equation performance is dependent upon how much experience the employee has. In this study (Avolio, 1990) explains how the length of experience that the employee has is a better predictor of work performance then age. This is support towards how older employees are just as good of workers if not better due to the amount of experience that have throughout the years of working.

           

          Also is this next article they conduct a study, which collected data from 6,000 workers whose employment was divided equally among five federal government agencies. This study spanned for about ten weeks but they made sure to only collect the data from offices that kept production records for the individual workers being studied. (Kutscher, 1960) was able to find three important findings the first one being the amount of man-hours being put into their work was insignificant between different age groups. The second one is that they found considerable variations between the workers being that older workers were exceeding the average performance of the younger workers. The last important thing they found is that the older workers had a much more consistent output of work compared to younger workers. Overall this study was able to conclude that its more common that older works are better at producing more accurate work and how experience was the major difference in how well employees performed.

Take away points

          This study above is proving that older employees performance shouldn’t be discriminated against when it comes to age. Organization need to understand that as long as they keep thinking that young workers are more valuable to speed their money training on they will see a decrease in business. If employers keep training their older workers then they will be able to use the experience they have and convert it into business for the company. If businesses keep letting its older workers go they will only have young less experienced employees which will mean lower performance rates. People should know that age means nothing when it comes to performance just because technology s changing doesn’t mean older employees can’t learn to adapt like the younger ones. Employers need to acknowledge older workers amount of experience that they’ve had throughout their years of working at the company which younger workers don’t have.When a company puts groups of younger and older workers together it allows for the best of both world since you have older employee experiences and younger workers knowledge in technology. That is how a businesses can use the knowledge of all its employees to the fullest potential.

References

Benjamin, T., & Media, D. (2013). The Ways Discrimination Negatively Affects Businesses | Chron.com. Small Business - Chron.com. Retrieved March 13, 2013, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/ways-discrimination-negatively-affects-businesses-36925.html

Mumtaz, S. (2010, June 9). Does Age have an effect on the performance at workplace? Articlesbase. Retrieved March 13, 2013, from http://www.articlesbase.com/self-help-articles/does-age-have-an-effect-on-the-performance-at-workplace-2588059.html

Avolio, B. J., Waldman, D. A., & McDaniel, M. A. (1990). Age and work performance in nonmanagerial jobs: The effects. Academy of Management Journal, 33(2), 407-407. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/199827143?accountid=12924

Kutscher, R. E., & Walker, J. F. (1960). Comparative job performance of office workers by age. Monthly Labor Review (Pre-1986), 83(000001), 39-39. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/227968680?accountid=12924