Age-Related Human Resource Management Policies and Practices: Antecedents, Outcomes, and Conceptualizations

Due to the demographic change in age, societies, firms, and individuals struggle with the need to postpone retirement while keeping up motivation, performance, and health throughout employees’ working life. Organizations,and specifically the Human Resource Management (HRM) practices they design and implement, take a central rolein this process. Being influenced by macro-level trends such as new legislation, organizational HRM practices affect outcomes such as productivity and employability both at the firm and individual level of analysis. This editorialintroduces the Special Issue on “Age-related Human Resource Management Policies and Practices” by conductingan interdisciplinary literature review. We offer an organizing framework that spans the macro-, meso-, and individuallevel and discusses major antecedents, boundary conditions, and outcomes of age-related HRM practices. Further,we propose a typology of HRM practices and discuss the role of individual HRM dimensions versus bundles ofHRM practices in dealing with an aging and more age-diverse workforce. Building on these considerations, we introduce the eight articles included in this special issue. Finally, taking stock of our review and the new studies presentedhere, we deduct some recommendations for future research in the field of age-related HRM.