Search

The global trend of graying workforce is accompanied with an increasing workplace age diversity. This substantial demographic change in age structure has led to growing research attention to the organizational consequences of age diversity in the last decade. Despite the progress, prior research has primarily focused on the statistical relationship between age diversity and organizational performance without empirically probing potential mechanisms underlying this relationship. Adopting an intellectual capital perspective, we posit that age diversity affects organizations' performance via shaping their human capital and social capital. Furthermore, we examine age-inclusive management (i.e., fair, nondiscriminatory, and inclusive organizational treatment of employees from all age groups) as a contingent factor that shapes the effects of age diversity on human and social capital. We tested the hypotheses using a large dataset on workplaces from Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) (N = 4,038). Results indicated that age diversity promoted human and social capital, which in turn enhanced organizational performance. In addition, age-inclusive management amplified the positive effect of age diversity on organizational performance via increased human and social capital. Our research sheds light on how age-diverse workforces create values via cultivating knowledge-based organizational resources (i.e., human and social capital). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]