Work Motivation and Aging

Abstract

This entry summarizes the present understanding of the relationships between work motivation and worker age. The central propositions are that work motivation does not linearly decline with age and that a look at the interplay of global and specific levels of motivation is required to understand the particular situation of workers over 50 years old. The entry concludes with an outlook to emerging research. Work motivation translates a worker’s knowledge, skills, and abilities into actual work behavior and job performance. The former enable workers to carry out their jobs as required, while the level of motivation determines the amount of effort workers actually put into their jobs, i.e., it regulates the intensity, duration, and persistence of work behaviors (Pinder 1998). In light of the impact of demographic change on the contemporary workplace, understanding the motivation of older workers – who are usually considered as “older” from the age of 50 – is of particular importance. In almost all industrialized countries, the average age of workers will be increasing markedly over the next two decades, as the numbers of young entries into the labor force will be decreasing. In response to this trend, retirement ages have been raised in several countries. Work lives will therefore become longer, making retention a key issue for many employers. Maintaining high levels of work motivation is an indispensable ingredient of successful retention. Established theories of work motivation, however, are quite silent about the influence of age on motivation. While research into work motivation has had a long tradition since the 1950s, the interest in age-related changes in work motivation is a relatively recent phenomenon. Only in the past 10 years or so have the relationships between worker age and motivation begun to receive substantial research attention. This entry summarizes the present understanding of the relationships between work motivation and worker age. To foreshadow, the most important research finding is that work motivation does not inevitably and linearly decline as a function of biological aging. Like for younger workers, motivation is influenced by interactions of workers’ goals and job demands. To understand what makes these interactions age-specific, current models incorporate constructs from lifespan psychology to describe the principles of motivational regulation. This regulation may be seen as multidirectional; it will be in the focus of the first section. Furthermore, contemporary models look at the interplay of global and specific levels of motivation to understand the particular situation of workers over 50 years old. That multilevel perspective will be the core of the second section. The entry concludes with an outlook to emerging research in the final section.