What do we know about managing aging teams? Lessons learned from the automotive shop floor

Abstract

The issue of the demographic shift towards an older population in Western industrialized countries and the resulting aging labor pool available to organizations has been researched for many years now. Various disciplines thus address different issues regarding the aging individual, organization, or society as a whole. In our field, however, we are mainly interested in analyzing how this particular demographic change affects the age composition of the workforce and, potentially, individual, team, and organizational interaction and performance. Moreover, managers and researchers alike do not merely analyze these potential challenges, but are impelled to find solutions to managing an aging workforce towards competitiveness. Consider the automotive industry: as in many other sectors, value creation is largely the result of team work. Teams typically work in management and administration, in research and development, and in the projects of a specific functional area. Teams often work across functional boundaries and are the crux of an automotive company’s organizational performance. In automotive companies, one of the purest and most elementary forms of team work is found on the production lines, which realize the core business’s value creation. Day by day, individuals convene, perform a specific task, or a whole set of tasks, and contribute to the realization of a product which, quite literally, is more than the sum of its parts. Together with all other organizational functions, it is this teamwork on the production lines that creates the business’s core outcome. However, since production is an important function of such an organization, the potential negative impact of age-related challenges on team performance and, thus, on organizational competitiveness is also evident. Our prior