Time Takes Us All? A Two Wave Study of Age and Time Effects on Sustainable Employability

Abstract

Various cognitive and physical abilities are found to decline with age. However, contrary to popular belief, it still remains a topic of disc whether these declines in abilities actually affect older employees’ capacities to function in their work and on the labor market remains topic of discussion. A major difficulty in assessing age effects is that they can be distorted by time effects. Therefore the present article aims to contribute to this discussion by disentangling the effects of age and time on sustainable employability. First, using a two wave sample of 2,672 employees (ages 35 to 65 years) from various Dutch organizations, multilevel regression analyses are used to estimate the effects of age and time on sustainable employability’s dimensions. Second, between- and within-subjects variances are estimated for each of the nine relevant dimensions of sustainable employability (over a timespan of two years). Analyses reveal that age has merely small effects on only two dimensions (i.e. employability and perceived health) and time on three (i.e. fatigue, job performance, and skill gap) dimensions of sustainable employability. Moreover, for all nine dimensions of sustainable employability most variance exists between (61.43% - 84.96%) rather than within (15.04% - 38.57%) subjects. These findings suggest that the natural process of aging only has a limited effect on working individuals’ capacities to function in their job and on the labor market. Consequently, rather than focusing only on older employees, organizations should contribute to the health, well-being, and competences, or rather the sustainable employability, of all employees regardless of age.