Employee age and health

Highlights

• This study examines the relationship between age and health in employee samples.

• Meta-analytical results indicate that age, by and large, is not related to poorer mental health.

• However, age was weakly and positively related to clinical measures of poor physical health.

• These findings suggest that, contrary to common age stereotypes, older workers do not have significantly poorer health.

Abstract

One particularly persistent and prevalent negative age stereotype is that older workers experience more health problems. This study examines whether this negative age stereotype is evidence-based or not. In a meta-analysis of previous studies on the relationship between age and health, we found that older employees suffered no declines in either mental health or self-reported physical health problems, but did experience modest declines on clinical indices of physical health (e.g., blood pressure, cholesterol level, and body mass index). The article concludes with directions for future research on the role of health in the age–performance relationship and its implications for management practice.

Introduction

Over the past 10–15 years, there has been noticeable growth in the amount of research conducted on older workers. This expansion of research has been driven by two factors in particular. First, the mean age of the world's population and the proportion of older individuals in the active workforce have increased (Anxo et al., 2012, Toossi, 2009), both because the Baby Boomer cohort is especially large and because its members have not shown a general inclination to early retirement. Second, managing an older workforce presents challenges in hiring and termination decisions (Henry and Jennings, 2004, Ostroff and Atwater, 2003, Poulston and Jenkins, 2013, Qu and Cheng, 1996). Older workers are entitled to special legal protections under the U.S. Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) (and its equivalents in other countries), yet negative stereotypes about older workers persist (Maurer et al., 2008, Posthuma and Campion, 2009).

One theoretical rationale frequently used to ground research on the relationships of age with work outcomes and career outcomes is that older workers experience more health problems (e.g., Scott, Berger, & Garen, 1995). That rationale emerges from several related lines of research. The occupational health and psychology literature suggests that a person's well-being on the job is inextricably linked with his/her well-being outside the workplace (Cooper and Cartwright, 1994, Danna and Griffin, 1999). The vocational development research suggests that, as employees age, their career decisions are increasingly influenced by personal concerns about their health (Bernhard-Oettel et al., 2005, Berntson and Marklund, 2007, Bound et al., 1999). The research on retirement decisions suggests that the health status of older workers strongly affects whether and when they retire (McGeary, 2009) and whether or not they choose to continue working in bridge employment after retirement (Kim and Feldman, 2000, Wenger and Reynolds, 2009).

Concerns about the health status of older workers have also influenced organizations' human resource management decisions. Researchers have found that organizations are increasingly anxious about the health insurance costs associated with employing older workers. As a result, numerous firms have shown increased reluctance in hiring older workers because managers fear older workers' health-related expenses will lead to skyrocketing health insurance premiums (Conen et al., 2012, Scott et al., 1995). Moreover, managers are often concerned that older workers' health problems will lower firm performance either directly or indirectly. If older workers have more severe health problems, their abilities to perform their own jobs quickly and correctly might be lessened. Further, if older workers' health problems result in more frequent or extended absences, firm performance is hurt indirectly as important tasks are delayed or pushed onto colleagues (Xu & Jensen, 2012). In addition, concerns about older workers' health and its potential impact on performance can lead to a disproportionate number of terminations of older workers. Unfortunately, these decisions can also lead to more frequent age discrimination lawsuits and unfavorable publicity for firms if those terminations are based on group-level stereotypes rather than on individual-level performance (Chao and Willaby, 2007, Kleiman and Lengnick-Hall, 1984, Leana and Feldman, 1992).

Thus, understanding the relationship of age to employee health has both theoretical and practical importance, yet there have been no attempts to comprehensively address that relationship. To enhance our knowledge in this area, we review the quantitative cumulative evidence on the relationship of age to indicators of physical and mental health. Meta-analyses are particularly useful here because they allow us to eliminate the confounding effects of random measurement errors, to cumulate effect sizes across studies after sampling error variance has been removed, and to make stronger inferences about the nature of those relationships (Lance et al., 2010, Sharma et al., 2009). We hope the cumulated data, drawn from multiple studies and collected by multiple authors, will lead to better evidence-based management of older workers.