Employee age and health
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.
Section snippets
Older adults vs. older workers
An important distinction needs to be drawn between “older adults” and “older workers.” As longevity has increased from generation to generation, it is now common for individuals to live well into their 80s and 90s. Consequently, the term older adults often refers to individuals in the population as a whole who are over age 65 or 70. However, the age range in the active workforce is narrower. The typical age range in which people retire is 60–65, with an especially large percentage of older
Negative stereotypes about older workers' health
Age stereotypes are schema or cognitive categories people use to evaluate others based on their age. There are two stages in the age stereotyping process (Bal, Reiss, Rudolph, & Baltes, 2011). In the first stage, a stereotype is activated. That is, a perceiver classifies a target individual into a group based on some visible characteristic (e.g., “this colleague is old”). In the second stage of age stereotyping, the perceiver applies the stereotype to a specific person in order to make
Literature search
We performed a comprehensive search for those field studies published in or before 2012 which examined the relationships between age and health variables. To identify studies for inclusion, we conducted numerous keyword searches in various electronic databases, including EBSCOHost, Emerald, Factiva, JSTOR, Oxford Journals, Proquest, PsycINFO, ScienceDirect, Sage Full-Text Collections, and Wiley InterScience databases.
Besides age, the keywords we searched for included health, well-being,
Results
Our research question addresses whether or not the relationships between age and health variables are negative. The meta-analysis results concerning the relationships between age and health variables are presented in Table 1. We conclude that an average corrected correlation is statistically significant when its 95% confidence interval does not include the value of zero. Following Cohen (1988), we interpret the corrected correlations as follows: weak (.10 to .23), moderate (.24 to .36), and
Discussion
The cumulative evidence we gathered here suggests that older employees do fare more poorly on clinical health indicators, but older employees do not self-report higher levels of physical health problems. Moreover, older workers do not have poorer mental health, even as they approach retirement age, nor do they suffer more from psychosomatic complaints. With the exception of smoking, older workers also do not engage in fewer health-maintenance behaviors. In this final section, we consider the
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