Ian Kaminsky, Max Berg, Jacob Dahukey, Ben Weaver, Jack Ventura -Winter 2020
Can Young Managers get Past Age Barriers in the Workplace?
Our blog covers ageism in the workplace. More specifically the blog will discuss how young individuals looking for management careers can hope to overcome the predetermined views of the older employees within the company.
References:
Buengeler, Claudia, et al. “The Challenge of Being a Young Manager: The Effects of Contingent
Reward and Participative Leadership on Team-Level Turnover Depend on Leader Age.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 37, no. 8, 2016, pp. 1224–1245., doi:10.1002/job.2101.
Being young is a major barrier that many managers can face. It is extremely hard with less experience in a workplace setting than your team members to convince them to take you seriously. This is mostly caused by a predetermined believe that older age means someone has more knowledge, advanced career, and high status, which most look for in a leader. This article argues that a prototypical leader leads to a more effective team overall. While, young leaders face issues that they must overcome just to get to the same level as their older counterparts. Also, the article explains that due to the difference in age a young leader must use other means to motivate their team if they want to be respected. For example, young leaders should rely on contingent rewards where they are consistently providing positive reinforcement to help the team start seeing them as their leader. The article also has a case study that took team members and had them answer questions based on a leader who is 23 years old and one that 48 years old to see what assumptions they make.
Chhabra, P. (2013). A Psychological Study on Gen Y to Reengineer HR Policy and Structure.
Journal of Commerce & Management Thought, 4(2), 356–383.
The Journal of Commerce and Management Thought covers the effects Gen Y employees are having on the workforce and how to adjust management to accommodate them. It conducts its research not only in the United States but also in India, the United Kingdom, and China. Starting off by trying to obtain a better understanding of Gen Y the journal uses data such as youth spending habits, consumption patterns, cognitive processes, careers, wealth, and challenges. With all this data in mind they relate it back to human resources management and how to get youth to come to businesses and stay there. The journal backs its claims by providing observational data from employees age 18-25 and how they react to compensation, organizational culture, workplace design, social media, creativity, productivity, emotional engagement and organizational structure in their workplaces.
Gekara, V. (2014). Are Older Workers ‘crowding out’ the Young?: A Study of the Australian
Transport and Logistics Labour Market. Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and
Economic Relations of Work, 25(4), 321-336.
This article looks at the ageing workforce which has led to significant skill shortages in the Australian labour market. They show this in relation to the rising youth unemployment and the social issues between youth and older generations. The overall study shows a view held by the majority of people that because the older generation is delaying retirement, the younger generation who have very important skills are being held back due to their age, not experience. They conclude that the problem isn’t the increased number of older workers preventing the youth from getting hired but the recruiting process and external costs of training the youth that is preventing them from getting hired.
Nor Amin, N. A., Wuen, C. H., & Ismail, A. (2017). Leadership style desired by youth in
Asia. Journal of Management Development, 36(10), 1206–1215.
This journal describes the relationship between youth and leaders in Asia and what youth look for in a leader. More specifically it looks at managers and leaders in South Korea and Brunei Darussalam and how the youth in that area react to them and their styles. Looking at this viewpoint from the opposite perspective could yield some new results the other resources may nor provide. For example studying the relationship between our two main subjects, the old and the young workforce, we may forget to view both sides of the story. Rather than adjusting young management to older employees, this journal explains adjusting older leaders to an influx of younger employees and potential managers. Not only this but the journal also strives to define leadership and what it means to young employees or followers. The journal then goes on to describe how the Path Goal Theory is one of the most desired approaches to management and leadership. Overall this journal would be useful for our blog because it provides another view to the subject we are focusing on.
Purwanti, J., & Romedly, J. (2019). Millennial Perspective on Leadership Style: The Case of
Telkom Indonesia. Proceedings of the European Conference on Management, Leadership & Governance, 487–495.
The Case of Telkom Indonesia studies the development of a new leader through company leadership programs. In Recent Years, Telkom Indonesia has been experiencing a transformation in people and culture. This is do to the company adjusting to the digital world and many of the older employees retiring. In the study, the researchers Juli Purwanti and Julius Romedly describe the difference in Telkom Indonisa’s expectations and the reality of their millennial leaders.They also discuss solutions to fixing generational gaps between employee and manager such as “minimizing traits of the different generation and increasing relationship between organizational commitment and workplace culture … to transfer knowledge effectively between older and younger”. This research is critical to our topic because it relates directly to age barriers in a workspace, is a recent study, and involves a different countries aspect on the situation.