The Aging Work Force - Coursework Example

Running Head: THE AGING WORKFORCE The Aging Workforce [The name of the writer appears here] [The name of the institution appears here] Table of Contents CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................03 Statement of the Problem Scope of the Study Rationale & Importance of the Study CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE........................................................06 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY...........................................................................................08 Approach Data Gathering Method Database of Study Validity of Data Originality and Limitation of Data Summary REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………..…………..13 Chapter 1: Introduction Human resource management encompasses the effort to effectively and humanely make use of people in organizations as much as it does the specific personnel policies and practices employed to do so. As the field itself often seems split, so too do its reactions to age-related issues. Most people conceptualize the aging process in terms of chronological aging. The point of emphasis is the neuro-physiological change, which is a direct function of the passing of years. Although metaphors of both ripening and decay have been applied, chronological aging is typically seen as a process of decline. While there is clear evidence of physical decline, the capabilities lost are of decreasing importance for work. Gross motor strength, fine motor control, and auditory acuity may decline with age, yet the technological aides common in most occupations reduce dependence on these attributes. Consequently, the current research foci are on memory/cognition and coping with adverse work conditions. Changes in memory and cognitive function are often discussed in terms of possible neuro-physiological changes. Since they have bearing on learning and decision-making, they may be relevant to job performance as well. There is credible evidence that cognitive processing declines somewhat with age. The more complex the tasks the greater the decrements associated with age. These age-based differences endure even over a large number of trials. However, while there is a reliable age effect, it seems to be smaller than the effect of task complexity within the age level (Schimamura et al., 1995). There is also evidence that life experience, in the form of occupation, moderates the relationship between cognitive processing and age. Thus, professors are less apt to suffer losses in active memory than people of similar age from a general population, although such differences would not be evident for rote memory (Schimamura et al., 1995). When the measured outcomes are actual work or simulated work tasks, the age effects found in the highly abstracted experimental tasks disappear, presumably because there are multiple strategies that can be used to perform (Czaja & Sharit, 1998). Statement of the Problem In the chosen area of research the following questions are under study: Is age a valid determining factor of performance? If older workers can perform well, does anyone in the organization know it? What effect can training and development have on older workforce motivation? How does one arrive at retirement? Scope of the Study This research encompasses the older workforce in organisations and implication of age on their overall productivity and performance. The sociological and physiological perspectives and their effects on employee marginal productivity will also be discussed. Rationale & Importance of the Study A great deal of effort in human resource management is dedicated to performance management, with the goal of improving individual and organization effectiveness. It is only natural that there should be an interest in looking at how aging affects performance. At its root, this is not very different from the question psychological researchers ask about chronological aging. The difference in human resource management is that the simple existence of a difference is not enough; the difference has to be material to performance. Human resource planning endeavours to assess the requirements a business will have for people with particular skills in the future and to put in place the actions necessary to assure that those resources will be present. Human resource planners were among the first to recognize the implications of demographic change and they indicated that the most obvious response to this change was a greater openness to diversity, both in terms of ethnicity and age. While those early calls were heard and discussed in corporations, they rarely resulted in much action. It was not that human resource executives were averse to providing older workers with opportunities. Indeed, they would be happy for well-performing employees to continue working with the organization as long as they wished. However, there was no special value attached to encouraging older workers to stay. In many organizations without highly developed human resource departments (Lewin, 1990), these questions are not even raised. Chapter 2: Literature Review What happens when one looks at age and job performance? In a study based on a simulated data entry task, three groups of workers (ages 20 to 30, 40 to 59, and 60 to 75) worked for 3 days (Czaja & Sharit, 1998). Over the 3 days, the oldest did the least amount of work; yet when production was controlled for quality, there were no significant differences in performance. Moving out of the laboratory, a field study of workers from 20 to 59 in a variety of work environments found that workers from 30 to 39 produced the highest quantity, but older workers produced higher quality, as measured by supervisor ratings (Rao & Rao, 1997). Hall and Mirvis (1995) take this one step further and exchange the notion of age-based transitions for ongoing cycles of stability and change as people develop, achieve a measure of success, and begin to look for new challenges. In their model of "protean careers," the focus is clearly on work identity. The time spent with a given career identity is more important than chronological age. Transition can be sparked by changes in the work environment. What happens in late career helps us understand the changing roles older workers take as part of the transition to retirement. For one consciously pursuing a protean career, skill acquisition for future jobs (i.e., employability) is an important consideration in most transitions. As one approaches retirement, the employ-ability issue becomes progressively less important; similar to Levinson's model, non-work activities and roles may become more important until they dominate in the new identity of being a retired person. The identity-based theories like the theory by Hall and Mirvis (1995) are of most use for individual intervention. It may even be difficult to read them without benchmarking one's own life experiences against them. One of their attractions is that they help people make sense and impose order on their career experiences, which is difficult in increasingly turbulent work environments. The need to make sense of one's work life is at the base of a recent approach to retirement counselling in which the individual is helped to develop a narrative explanation of his or her career, to both better understand past experience and facilitate adjustment to the new roles in retirement. In many cases, one retires from job at the behest of others or based on some physical or situational demand. Workers in physically demanding fields retire more frequently as the result of a disability (Krause et al., 1997). However, the frequency of retirement from disability in these jobs may be reduced either by improved communication with co-workers or a supportive supervisor. This latter finding suggests that these retirements are, in a large part, a response to job stressors, not just the diminished physical capacity suggested by disability. If disability is not reason enough to retire, what is? Certainly, "voluntary" early retirement is not unambiguously voluntary. In practice, voluntary downsizings may be framed with the possibility of a subsequent round of downsizing that is not voluntary. Those who have the least self-confidence or are the most financially tenuous may feel compelled to accept the offer, even though it results in a harmful choice (Gowan, 1998). Examination of the factors that lead people to choose early or voluntary retirement suggests that more subtle forces may be at work. Chapter 3: Methodology Approach This study was designed to capture a cross-sectional snapshot and a dynamic longitudinal picture of the underlying phenomena. In order to accomplish this, data were collected in two waves that were three months apart. In Phase 1, data were collected from over 100 companies and other resources. Three months later, in Phase 2, an attempt was made to collect data from all phase 1 respondents for a follow-up survey to understand the changing views, follow-up behavior pattern and to cater for various technological advancements. A variety of techniques is available to capture home users’ perceptions and attitudes. In order to obtain a nationally representative sample of respondents within a limited time frame and budget, e-mail and telephone surveys were the most appropriate options. Telephone interviews lend themselves to more flexibility and are equal, if not superior, to other active methods of data collection. Further, telephone interviews reduce the amount of bias normally associated with an in-person interview due to the elimination of visual cues. Also, the potential for an increased response rate made the telephone interview more appealing, as response rates for random e-mail surveys tend to be as low as 10% to 15%. Finally, the ability to elicit open-ended responses and to follow up on those responses using a two-stage questioning methodology allows to obtain factors that were not constrained by a priori identification of constructs as in traditional survey research, and also to determine the importance of each of the factors. These two components were very important given the exploratory nature of this work. Data Gathering Method Apart from the usual sources of knowledge acquisition, namely, magazine or journal articles, website links and books, a detailed survey, consisting of a series of telephonic interviews, was carried out. Nearly 130 corporate and companies were contacted and the primary Human Resource decision maker in the company was invited to participate in the voluntary phone survey during a three-week window in Sep/Oct 2003 (Phase 1). The interviews were conducted in different time slots during the day and evening, from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday. On average, an interview took just under five minutes to complete and interviewers produced an average of 4.1 responses per hour. Participants in Phase 1 were asked what they perceive about older workforce and their productive capacity. The question was asked to identify the perception and practices of top Human Resource personnel for the benefits of aging workforce. The follow-up survey (Phase 2) was completed three months later. While random dialing and e-mail were employed in Phase 1, in Phase 2, only those who provided completed and usable responses in Phase 1 were contacted. The interviewers did not specifically know who they had reached (in Phase 2 also), but responses were tracked across the two phases to allow a within-subject comparison, if needed. The instrument used in this research featured questions regarding factors related to Voice over IP networks. Open-ended questions were written to elicit factors which could be of concern, like Sociological and social psychological perspectives & Chronological age. The open-ended questioning allowed gathering of information from the respondents in an unbiased and non-leading way. The questions were evaluated and minor modifications were made based on their feedback. It was important to keep the survey simple in order to be understandable to the broad audience. A two-stage questioning technique was employed to elicit the importance of older workforce in organisational setting. For example, in the first stage, respondents were asked about the Sociological and social psychological perspectives, the second stage of questioning asked to what extent performance was effected due to age (on a five-point scale, where 1 was not at all and 5 was considerably). The two-stage questioning method complemented the open-ended questions since it allowed determining the importance of each of the individual responses. This method of assessing effect using frequency counts has been employed in research; the descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) of the importance values of the constructs provides additional richness that is not available with frequencies. All responses were handled in the same manner, regardless of how extensive an answer the respondent gave. Database of Study Several journals and books were referred to get a complete and thorough understanding of the topic which have been referred in the References section. Of the 130 companies who were contacted, 98 (75.4% percent) participated in the study and 95 completed the entire survey and provided usable responses for an overall response rate of 73.1%. The three components of non-response error in this case are those who could not be reached, those who refused to participate, and those who started but did not complete the survey. In Phase 2, a follow-up call was made to all respondents from Phase 1. The overall follow-up response rate was 85.9%. Respondent participation in Phase 1 but not in Phase 2 was attributable to two primary reasons: inability to reach respondents (e.g., invalid phone number perhaps due to change of address and no forwarding information, no response, or voice-mail on all four call-backs) or unwillingness to participate. Validity of Data Most of the data was collected from authentic sources like websites, books and journals of famous authors and other IT and informative magazines. Two interviewers, that is, one volunteer and the writer, took part in interviewing for this project. They had asked for tips and help from a professional with 3.5 years of interviewing experience, including at least six months of telephone interviewing, and were trained on this particular instrument by the same professional. The writer randomly monitored telephone interviews and contacted some respondents at random to verify their participation in the interview. These tactics were necessary to ensure the validity of the data collected. Originality and Limitation of Data The originality of this study is emphasized by the fact that in the past not much research has been done in this subject. The data collected had to be original and latest as the changing technology and its impact on the workforce in general. As with any empirical research, this study has limitations. The primary limitation of this study is the potential for response bias. For example, those who were themselves part of the older workforce ruled out any impact on performance while those who were younger might have less bias ideas. Another limitation concerns the length of the interview. Due to cost constraints coupled with a desire to obtain a reasonable response rate, a shortened interview was chosen. This decision is not without drawbacks. A longer survey could have resulted in richer responses. For example, the respondents could have been asked to describe the situation when they were in a situation to force early retirement from and older employee or were hesitant in hiring a senior person. This approach could have provided greater insights and potentially provided a richer model. Future work that attempts to capture greater depth of this research area may choose to use this approach. Finally, one drawback of the telephone interview is the potential for non-response errors due to inadequate sampling frame specification. In other words, while the population is UK companies, the sampling frame will include only those companies with telephones. Some telephone survey research omits all individuals not listed in telephone directories. Although some companies are omitted from the study (i.e., those without telephones) the impact of their omission will be minimal compared to the increased overall response rate. Summary The longitudinal study with two waves of measurement, an initial survey and a follow-up survey three months later, yielded several important and interesting insights. First, it helped identify several dimensions within each construct included in the theoretical development thus leading to a more detailed understanding of the future of aging workforce in UK companies. References Czaja, S. J., & Sharit, J. (1998). Ability performance relationships as a function of age and task experience for a data entry task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 4, 332-351. Gowan, M. A. (1998). A preliminary investigation of factors affecting appraisal of the decision to take early retirement. Journal of Employment Counseling, 35, 124-137. Hall, D. T., & Mirvis, P. H. (1995). The new career contract: Developing the whole person at midlife and beyond. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 47, 269-289. Krause, N., Lynch, J, Kaplan, G. A., Cohen, R. D., Goldberg, D. E, & Salonen, J. T. (1997). Predictors of disability retirement. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 23, 403-413. Lewin, D. (1990). How do U.S. companies really manage their human resources? Human Resource Planning Society Newsletter, 12(4), 1-2. Rao, G. B., & Rao, S. S. (1997). Sector and age differences in productivity. Social Science International, 13, 51-52. Schimamura, A. P., Berry, J. M., Mangels, J. A., Rusting, C. L., & Jurica, P. J. (1995). Memory and cognitive abilities in university professors: Evidence for successful aging. Psychological Science, 6, 271-277. Read More