Abstract

The aging workforce is a widely acknowledged, major organizational phenomenon. Nevertheless, its present level of scholarship is both narrow in focus and inconclusive in implications for key organizational domains: namely, individual-level performance (why does evidence suggest no effect of worker age on overall performance?), interpersonal-level discrimination (why do older workers face heightened discrimination if their performance is generally valued?), and group-level diversity (why has research failed to identify consistent age diversity benefits?). The present review argues that answering these questions necessitates expanding the older worker space by incorporating research approaches of other, well-established literature studies—each of which offer equally valid ways of understanding (older) worker age, but do not typically cast themselves as covering age per se. Although these other literatures—comprising Generation, Age, Tenure, and Experience (GATE)—potentially foster a more sophisticated conception of older workers than present approaches typically offer, these literatures have remained largely separate, resulting in their own level of inconclusive and sometimes contradictory predictions for an aging workforce. To address each of these issues going forward, researchers must integrate GATE elements in all older worker investigations. A GATE approach avoids overreliance on chronological age as a predictor, more accurately represents the inherent complexity of age as a status category, and potentially offers more definitive conclusions than present approaches do. Such is timely, and crucial, for a topic that is somehow both ubiquitous in the workforce and yet not well understood by mainstream organizational scholarship.

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Vol. 13, No. 2

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Received 10 September 2017

Accepted 24 March 2019

Published online 15 July 2019

Published in print 1 July 2019

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Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the impressively thorough and constructive comments from associate editor Matthew Cronin, editor Daan van Knippenberg, and two anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to Steve Blader for his generous time and effort in providing feedback on this manuscript’s initial proposals, and to Angela Shakeri for assisting with the literature search.

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A GATE to Understanding “Older” Workers: Generation, Age, Tenure, Experience

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