Age-Aware Organizations and the Relationship Between Shift Work and Psychological Well-being Across the Lifespan

Abstract

As the global workforce ages, it has become more important to understand how seemingly age-neutral HR practices can create unintended age-specific effects. For example, shift work—nominally an age-neutral HR practice—has been shown to have stronger negative effects on older workers’ physical and mental health. Although these effects are well established, how organizations can mitigate the age-specific effects of scheduling practices represents an important gap in the aging workforce literature. More specifically, the role of the organization in setting human resource practices and policies that are sensitive to older workers likely determines the strength of the age-specific effects of shift work on psychological well-being. Using mixed effects analyses in a large dataset of German employees and employers, we integrate lifespan psychology and HR strategy research to examine the relationship between shift work and psychological well-being across working lives. We then examine how the implementation of organizational age structure analysis may buffer this relationship. Results largely support the benefits of an active, “age-aware” approach to managing the aging workforce as psychological well-being increased with age among all workers except shift workers in establishments that did not conduct an age structure analysis.