Older workers are stereotyped as less competent, trainable and adaptable by their younger colleagues, influencing how they are viewed by management, a University of Queensland study has found.
Associate Professor Chad Chiu from UQ's Business School said surveys conducted across workplaces in Australia and Taiwan found consistent evidence that younger workers were less trusting of their older coworkers.
"Workplace structures are becoming more and more horizontal, which means we often see people with significant age gaps working in the same roles," Dr Chiu said.
"Younger workers often make unfair judgments about this - when they work with older colleagues sharing similar job titles they often wonder why they don't advance to more senior positions.
"Intuitively, younger workers can jump to a conclusion that their older peers are incompetent and less trustworthy, making them reluctant to collaborate with them.
"What is worse is that their immediate supervisor thinks the older worker is not performing well because nobody wants to share information or projects with them, or work with them in general."
A first study surveyed 199 employees of 56 professional work teams in consulting and technology firms in Taiwan, to determine the level of trust younger workers put in their older colleagues.
In a second study, an online experiment presented 177 Australian participants aged 22 and older with a scenario involving a 55-year-old engineer responding to an urgent production issue.
They were asked to assess how capable the engineer appeared, with responses collated according to the age of the participants.
"Younger people expressed lower levels of trust in our engineer," Dr Chiu said.
"They may have thought of them as a nice or supportive colleague, but they didn't see them as useful."
Dr Chiu said the research showed older workers could regain their reputation by being vocal about their skills, but managers also had a role to play.
"When younger employees receive very little information about their older colleagues' capabilities, they will primarily rely on surface-level characteristics like age to make a judgment," he said.
"Employers and team managers have a responsibility to give older employees opportunities or platforms to show they are capable.
"It is a mistake to think they don't need support because they're older or more experienced.
"These findings offer important insights for older professionals seeking to sustain their careers, as well as for managers aiming to lead inclusive and age-diverse professional teams more effectively."
Read the research published in Human Relations.
