Still feeling employable with growing age? Exploring the moderating effects of developmental HR practices and country-level unemployment rates in the age – employability relationship

Abstract

A compelling issue for organizations and societies at large is to ensure external employability of the workforce across workers’ entire work-life span. Using the frameworks of age norms, stereotyping and age meta-stereotypes, we investigate whether (a) age is negatively related to perceived external employability; and (b) the age-employability link is moderated by HR developmental practices (HRDPs) and unemployment rate. We argue that being aware of stereotypes and age norms in organizations, and holding also meta-stereotypes about their group, older workers perceive themselves as less externally employable. However, the context –HRDPs that one has experienced, and the country unemployment rate – would act as buffers. Using data from a large-scale survey from over 9000 individuals in 30 institutionally diverse countries, we found that the negative relationship between age and perceived external employability was significant across all countries. In addition, at the individual level, we found that HRDPs acted as a buffer for this negative relationship, such that the effect was less pronounced for individuals who have experienced more HRDPs during their working life. At the country level, the hypothesized moderating effect of unemployment rate was not observed. Limitations, future research directions, as well as practical implications of the study are discussed.

Keywords:

• Perceived external employability
• age
• developmental HR practices
• unemployment rate
• cross-country study

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to express their appreciation to all the members of the 5C consortium for their invaluable contribution in data collection. They also wish express their gratitude to Marcy Crary for for feedback and advice on the paper and to the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Furthermore, on a more detailed point, negative news (e.g., high unemployment rate) is much more likely to be communicated in mass media than favorable news. As a consequence, when the national unemployment is very high, this negative information is a very salient issue and may have a much greater impact on individuals' perceptions (e.g., perceived external employability) than positive information (Soroka, 2006). However, in our sample we have few countries with very high unemployment rate (above 15% or even above 10%). The majority have lower unemployment rates, and this somewhat restricted range might reduce the possibility of observing a moderation effect in the age-perceived employability relationship.

2 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this valuable suggestion.