Work Motivation and Aging

Encyclopedia of Geropsychology DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_31-1 # Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2015

Work Motivation and Aging Christian Stamov-Roßnagel* Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

Synonyms Employee motivation; Work motives; Work-related attitudes

Definition 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.

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The Multidirectional Perspective The early view on age-related changes in work motivation was characterized by a notion of decline and seemed to justify the common stereotype (see Posthuma and Campion, 2009) that work motivation decreases as workers age. Warr (2001) listed a number of reasons why work motivation was likely to go down with age. First, the longer one has received certain bonuses and incentives, the higher a threshold these incentives must exceed to have equal value. As incentives cannot increase indefinitely, however, that hedonic treadmill effect will decrease motivation. Habits are a second source of motivation decline, because deviations from long-practiced work behaviors (e.g., when new technologies are introduced) might be perceived as aversive. A third source is workers’ need for comparison of their performance to their colleagues’ attainments. Across work life, the reference group may change as older workers compare their performance not only to that of their peers but also of their younger colleagues. Age-related norms and stereotypes could be a fourth source of age differences. For instance, older workers might show little interest in work-related training simply because others (supervisors, colleagues, friends, etc.) do not expect them to do so. Finally, older workers might have lower perceptions of the probability of attaining positive work outcomes, which would also adversely affect work motivation. Although that early view draws attention to the fact that rather heterogeneous factors might influence work motivation, motivation itself was depicted as a relatively passive and mostly negative “response” to personal (e.g., capability declines) and environmental (e.g., altered work demands) changes. However, job satisfaction research shows that job satisfaction is usually higher in older than in middle-aged workers. Furthermore, age has in several meta-analyses been demonstrated to be unrelated to core job performance. For some dimensions of job performance, even positive age effects have been shown such that the number of safety behaviors and avoidable absences rises and falls, respectively, with age. This suggests that there may be more to older workers’ motivation than mere decline. Borrowing from lifespan psychology, more recent models of age effects on work motivation have adopted the notion that such age effects may be multidirectional, i.e., there may be decline in some aspects of work motivation, but stability, or even an increase in other facets. As a first version of the contemporary view, Kanfer and Ackerman (2004) proposed a theoretical framework centering on the notions that (a) the level of work motivation results from a worker’s beliefs about how likely he or she would be to attain certain workrelated outcomes and how attractive these outcomes are to that worker and that (b) age moderates these beliefs in a systematic way. For instance, workers hold beliefs about how much effort they will have to invest to attain a particular performance level. As capabilities for the fast processing of complex information decline from middle to late adulthood, workers will expect they have to invest particularly high effort, which might lower their performance expectancies – and thus motivation – whenever such fast and complex processing is required. Performance expectancies might remain unaffected or even increase with age, however, if workers can use expertise, routines, or job experience, because such experiencebased capabilities remain stable or even increase well into late adulthood (Baltes et al. 2006). At least in principle, this would leave older workers with the option of focusing on roles and tasks in which they can use their expertise and routine in order to experience feelings of mastery and accomplishment. Current conceptions capitalize exactly on that latter notion of motivational selectivity that features in general models of developmental regulation in lifespan psychology. In other words, contemporary models of age-related changes in work motivation are premised on the notion that people use a variety of strategies to match their resources to external demands. As a general strategy, people select subjectively important goals, optimize the ways they try to attain their goals, and thereby compensate for age-related losses (SOC strategy; see Baltes and Baltes 1990). More specifically, socio-emotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen 2006) predicts that the nature of subjectively important goals will change across the lifespan as people’s general sense of time shifts from “time since birth” to “time until death” around Page 2 of 6


mid-life. As a consequence, goals which concern the acquisition of knowledge and goals concerning the regulation of positive emotional states shift importance. When time is perceived as open ended, prioritized goals rather relate to “investments,” focusing on gathering information, on experiencing novelty, and on expanding skills and knowledge. When time is perceived as constrained, goals related to “harvesting” become more salient that can be realized in the short term, such as emphasizing feeling states and regulating emotional states to optimize psychic well-being. Consistent with these assumptions, the empirical evidence converges in the finding that work-related motives systematically differ in their relationship with age. Motives refer to a worker’s preference for particular job characteristics and classes of outcomes (e.g., high performance, good pay, friendly coworkers). Most broadly, growth-related, security-related, and social motives may be distinguished. The former include activities aimed at reaching higher levels of functioning, such as, for instance, participation in organizational training and development programs or taking on leadership roles. Social motives represent a preference for job characteristics and work outcomes that pertain to affiliation and collaboration with others, whereas security motives involve a preference for job features and work outcomes that secure one’s general welfare. From a socio-emotional selectivity viewpoint, security and social motives would be expected to be higher for older workers, as these convey positive emotional states. The strength of growth motives, on the other hand, would be expected to decline. Supporting the latter hypothesis, across studies, negative correlations of age with motives such as seeking advancement or promotion, as well as development and challenge, emerge. At the same time, older workers report stronger motive strength for job characteristics and outcomes related to accomplishment, job enjoyment, and utilizing their existing skills. In terms of security motives, older workers indicate a stronger preference for job security, while the correlation of age with the importance of compensation and benefits is generally negative. In a similar fashion, relative to their younger colleagues, older workers indicate a stronger preference for helping people or contributing to society through their jobs, but pay less attention to the recognition they gain from their job and to working with people. There are moderators of the age-motive relationship; for instance, the relationship between age and growth motives was positive among bluecollar workers, but negative among white-collar workers. In sum, therefore, research shows that work preferences from the same class (growth, security, social) may show differential relationships with age. This finding is consistent with the assumption that work motivation may change with age in a multidirectional way. Also, the finding that growth motives are positively related to age in some groups of workers, but not in others, supports the assumption that there is no normative, biological motivation decline with age. In sum, the evidence available to date suggests that work motivation does not uniformly decline with age, but may increase for certain aspects of jobs and decrease for other aspects. Like for their younger colleagues, older workers’ motivation is shaped by the interaction of person characteristics and job demands. Older workers are likely to have a different perspective on their occupational future than their younger colleagues in that they perceive fewer remaining developmental opportunities in their work lives, but this future time perspective, rather than depend on age per se, is largely influenced by the complexity of one’s job and the degree of control workers have over their jobs.

The Multilevel Perspective The research summarized above is primarily intended to account for the determinants and consequences of motivation at work, i.e., as workers perform their work roles on a daily basis. Motivation at work is largely determined by momentary and situational drivers and can be defined as the kind of motivation that one experiences at a specific time and toward a specific activity. Page 3 of 6


A profound understanding of age-related changes in work motivation requires, however, that other levels of motivation on top of motivation at work be taken into account. The central proposition of a recent model is that workers’ motivation is determined by three levels of work-related goals and motives (Kanfer et al. 2013). One of those levels concerns the at-work goals discussed in the previous section. Together with those, to-work goals and to-retire goals need to be considered. Motivation to work is similar to earlier constructs such as work centrality or the meaning of work and refers to the general value and importance one attaches to one’s work. More technically speaking, motivation to work denotes the motivation to enter into a formal or informal public work arrangement in which workers allocate personal resources (e.g., time, attendance, mental or physical effort) in exchange for a portfolio of expected material (e.g., pay, healthcare benefits) and immaterial (e.g., sense of competence, recognition) rewards. The motivation to retire simply refers to the intention and preparedness to exit from one’s current work. There are two main reasons why it is important to integrate into models of age differences in work motivation both the motivation to work and the motivation to retire. First, it is around the age of 50 that the latter types of motivation begin to change and to play a more influential role than in earlier phases of one’s work life. For instance, around that age, most workers’ careers have reached or are near their “peak” in terms of the highest possible position and salary level. Also, as most people’s financial situation might relax (e.g., because mortgages have been paid off), benefits and compensation begin to be of lesser importance. At the same time, retirement might be on the horizon for the first time. Therefore, the constellation of motivational drivers might be quite different to that of younger and middle-aged workers, for whom the motivation to work might be a more uniform motivational driving force and for whom the motivation to retire might not play a significant role at all. These marked differences between younger and middle-aged workers on the one hand and older workers on the other hand need to be considered in research on work motivation and aging. The second reason for the multilevel view on older workers’ motivation is that a uniform, “hierarchical” relationship between the motivation to work and the motivation to retire on the one hand and motivation at work on the other hand is less than likely. Even if motivation to work decreased and motivation to retire increased beyond the age of 50, this would not necessarily imply that motivation at work also went down. As mentioned above, motives of accomplishment, job enjoyment, and utilizing one’s existing skills are positively related to age; they convey a sense of mastery and competence and thus are beneficial to one’s job-related well-being and presumably even to one’s general well-being. Therefore, workers are likely to maintain relatively high levels of motivation at work even in light of decreasing motivation to work. In line with these assumptions, recent research on the transition from work to retirement in the age group of 55–70 years shows that sizeable percentages of workers who leave their jobs before the official retirement age – indexing relatively low motivation to work – engage in voluntary work after retirement. This trend is most pronounced in workers who report having enjoyed their last position before retirement. This fits with Kanfer et al.’s (2013) proposition that the association between the motivations to work and at work is relatively weak, given that motivation to work is influenced by sociocultural and economic conditions, while at-work goals are most strongly influenced by local work conditions.

Summary and Outlook As the percentage of older workers continues to rise, age-related changes in work motivation receive growing research attention. Understanding the system underlying such changes is vital for developing work design and managerial practices that enable motivated work throughout one’s work life. After a decade of research on age differences in work motivation, one of the most important insights is that those age differences may best be described as being of a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, nature. In terms Page 4 of 6


of motivation at work, i.e., motivated work on a daily basis, older workers are not generally motivated more or less than their younger colleagues, but they might be motivated for different aspects of their jobs. These differences are not so much a result of biological aging, but of changes in goal priorities. Motivation to work might be lower in older workers relative to their younger counterparts, but this will not invariably incur decline in motivation at work. As far as the “big picture” is concerned, research on work motivation and aging appears to be in good shape. Current models integrate the global level of motivation to work and the specific level of motivation at work; by looking at the interactions of these levels, such models take a more fine-grained look than many of the established “age-free” theories of motivation. Also, adopting the motivational selectivity principles from lifespan psychology builds a bridge toward a stronger incorporation of work-related affect into theories of work motivation. These have been criticized of overemphasizing cognitive processes at the price of neglecting affect. Research on work motivation and aging has begun to show, however, how affective processes might be central determinants of motivation and that certain aspects of motivation cannot be reasonably studied isolated from affect. In the face of longer work lives, understanding the links between affect and motivation will be of growing importance to enable the designing of physically and psychically sustainable work. That said, one of the goals for the next decade of research could be to work toward coherent, integrated models. For a couple of years now, there have been calls for metatheories of motivation. At present, in the field of general work motivation, there are several established theories that are used “in parallel,” but how they relate to one another remains largely unexplored. On top of this, research on work motivation and aging imports additional concepts (e.g., socio-emotional selectivity) into the field and proceeds in a theoretically eclectic fashion. This might further complicate the situation unless some of the future work is dedicated to “tidying up” the conceptual landscape. On the methodological side, more longitudinal work will of course be needed to model age-related changes in work motivation. In addition to established multiple-wave survey designs, research might benefit from experience-sampling designs. For instance, to reveal age differences in at-work goals, which are most strongly influenced by local work conditions and which change in a multidirectional fashion, week-level studies could look at workers’ perception of their work conditions (e.g., supervisor support, job complexity, and intensity) in a given week and their levels of motivation in that same week. Also, job-related well-being could easily be included as an outcome measure. Conducted over a number of weeks and with workers from several age groups, such studies would show work motivation and its drivers and underlying age differences “in motion.”

Cross-References ▶ Affect and Emotion Regulation in Aging Workers ▶ Job Attitudes and Age ▶ Motivational Theory of Lifespan Development ▶ Older Workers ▶ Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory

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