Author(s)

Jiahui Chen, Zirui He, Yuanyuan Zheng

Corresponding Author

Jiahui Chen

ABSTRACT

The current aging of society is serious and the labor pyramid is shifting toward middle and old age. While the proportion of older employees in society is increasing, some companies and employees hold a greater bias against older employees, and older employees feel a sense of unfairness, deprivation and loss. In this paper, a questionnaire based on Petrou et al.'s scale was adapted and a model with job reshaping as a mediating variable was developed to investigate the association between age bias and performance earned by older employees. It was found that higher levels of age discrimination reduce job performance by decreasing employees' job reshaping, and this finding held true after a series of robustness studies. The moderating and influencing effects of older employees on work engagement are present, and their effective cognitive and psychological moderating mechanisms can be exerted through job reshaping. The results of this study can provide valuable management suggestions for HR managers and companies to improve older employees' work engagement.

KEYWORDS

job performance, work reinvention, age discrimination