Individual Differences: Age & Gender

Individual Differences:Age & Gender Lindsey Greco Spring, 2011

Age • Statistics for Older Workers • Institutional Barriers for Older Workers • Attitudes • Practices • Legal concerns • Physiological Changes

BLS Data

Institutional Barriers for Older Workers • Healthy retirees have 10-30 years of life expectancy • Largest untapped source of potential labor in economy • Face disincentives to work • Workplace attitudes and practices may hinder older workers’ employment opportunities

Organizational Attitudes: Fact or Fiction? • Older workers can’t or won’t learn new skills • Older workers don’t stay on the job long • Older workers take more sick days than younger workers • Older workers aren’t flexible or adaptable • Older workers are more expensive

Advantages of Older Workers • Are careful, calm, and effective • Less training costs due to their experience • Higher organizational commitment • Equal or better attendance rates • Lower on-the-job accident rates • Higher performance and productivity • More reliable than younger workers, stronger work ethic, can serve as mentors • Can help address talent shortages, recruitment challenges, and unwanted turnover

Organizational Practices: Financial Disincentives • Healthcare costs may increase for older workers, making it difficult to get hired into new jobs • Pension plans • Benefits resemble a hill • Pension accrual rises with time on the job, then peaks and falls • Peak accrual occurs after 30 years • Staying on job for additional years can result in negative pension accruals • Phased retirement plans reduces hours to part time and then eases them into retirement • Have to deal with tax code (paying out of pension plan), Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)

International Organizational Practices • Increase national pension eligibility to 65 (UK & Japan) • Government promoted programs that match older workers with employers or offer training opportunities (UK & Japan) • Changed benefit calculation to reward those who work longer by basing pension on lifetime earnings instead of the highest 15 out of 30 years (Sweden) • Increased the reward for those who defer drawing benefits from the national pension system (UK) • Creation of a government commission to explore new policies to promote skill development for older workers (Sweden)

Legal Considerations • Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) • Protects workers over 40 from discrimination • Applies to private and federal entities • Does not apply to state governments • Enforced by the EEOC • Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) • Sets minimum standards for pension plans in private industry. • Does not require any employer to establish a pension plan. It only requires that those who establish plans must meet certain minimum standards. • Enforced by the DOL

Considerations for Older Workers • As people age they are at higher risk for several diseases and injuries are much more severe • Elderly have a higher risk of workplace fatalities relative to their share of employment • Higher rates of fatalities and falls • Loss of physical fitness, environmental hazards, adverse effects of medication • Although older workers are less likely to be hurt seriously enough to lose work time, they often take twice the time needed to return to work. • Causes increased economic burden on medical care system, corporation costs, and individual hardships • More often have broken bones/multiple injuries • Take longer to heal

Physiological Changes • Vision • Hearing • Musculoskeletal • Co-morbidities and Chronic Diseases

Vision • Decline in static and dynamic visual acuity, loss of contrast sensitivity, decrease in dark adaptation, increase in susceptibility to glare. • Clutter (i.e., non-target information in the visual field) and search deficiencies make it more difficult for older workers to see critical information and easier to miss it because of clutter • Workplace accommodations: • Controls that are well lit, clean, uncluttered displays • Illumination should increase without creating glare. • Printed material (including instructions and warnings) should be large (at least 12pt font) • Older people have a restricted field of view, so they are least likely to notice signs that are not in their direct line of sight • Color-coding should be provided on changes in ramps and surfaces to prevent falls, which are the leading occupational fatality among older workers

Hearing • Age-related hearing loss is thought to begin at about age 35, but becomes more pronounced with advancing age • Older workers score significantly lower than younger workers in auditory task performance • Poor auditory discrimination • Orgs should try to control noise exposure in the environment • Soft music, sound-absorbing materials • Create conference tables and rooms that reduce echoing and facilitate communication • Conduct audiometric exams annually • Encourage use of hearing protection when necessary

Musculoskeletal Changes • Muscular strength at 51-55 is 80% of that at 31-35 • Reduction in joint mobility and manual dexterity • For young workers, tool design is unrelated to job performance • For old workers, poorly designed tools had lowest JP of all groups • High design quality led to highest JP of all groups • Slowing of reaction and movement times • Depending on task complexity, older adults are slower to respond. • Response speed has a linear relationship with task complexity • Older adults have more difficulty managing or coordinating multiple tasks • But older workers have more experience than younger workers • So older workers apply previously learned skills to current situations, resulting in comparable performance with younger workers • Considerations: allowance of longer response time, additional practice, frequent refresher training. • Training should be tailored to meet the needs of older adults

Co-morbidities and Chronic Diseases • Arthritis • High blood pressure • Visual and hearing impairments • Emerging problem is the use of medications • Impact physical/cognitive abilities and increase the risk of drug interaction

Gender • Biological Differences • Physical brain structure • Hormones • Behavioral Differences • Communication • Mate Guarding • At Work • Leadership Style • Job Stress • Mental Health • Workplace Anger

Biological Differences • Brain Structure • Researchers generally believe the female brain is organized to function more symmetrically allowing integration of left and right brain functions more readily than the male brain. • Male and female brains may be somewhat differently structured with the two cerebral hemispheres being more specialized and less well interconnected in men than in women. • Hormones • Role in initial brain development • Continued impact on behavior patterns

Different Task/Skill Performance • Differences in the way men and women estimate time, judge speed of things, carry out mental mathematical calculations, orient in space and visualize objects in three dimensions, etc. • Men • Tend to be higher in independence, dominance, spatial and mathematical skills, and rank-related aggression • e.g., men have an advantage in tests that require the subject to imagine rotating an object or manipulating it in some other way • Women • Tend to be better in human relations: recognizing emotional overtones in others and in language, emotional and artistic expressiveness, esthetic appreciation, verbal language and carrying out detailed and pre-planned tasks. • e.g., women generally can recall lists of words or paragraphs of text better than men

Communication • Male • Hierarchy based on competition • Goals are real and material • Rules and individual roles are clearly established in each situation • Women • Hierarchy based on cooperation • Goals are social and sharing • Rules and individual roles are sometimes tentative and changing

Mate Guarding • Men are more likely than women to become distressed by sexual infidelity • Women are more likely than men to become distressed by emotional infidelity • These fundamental sex differences have now been replicated by many different scientists in many diverse cultures – • China (David Geary) • Sweden (Michael Wiederman) • Netherlands (Bram Buunk and PieternelDijkstra) • Germany (AloisAngeitner and Victor Oubaid) • Japan (Mariko Hasegawa and Toshikazu Hasegawa) • Korea (Jae Choe)

Mate Guarding • 234 participants were asked to imagine that their partner had become both sexually and emotionally involved with someone else • then asked to state which component of the betrayal they found more upsetting. • 63% of the men, but only 13% of the women, found the sexual component of the infidelity to be more upsetting. • 87% of the women, but only 37% of the men, found the emotional component of the infidelity to be more upsetting. • Supports the evolutionary hypothesis that the fundamental psychological design of the jealousy adaptation differs for the sexes

Threatening Characteristics of Rivals • Which rivals are perceived to be the most threatening? • Dutch, Korean, and American people were asked to rank 11 rival qualities according to which would be most upsetting. • The rival characteristics ranged from “having a better sense of humor than you” to “being a more skilled sexual partner than you” • Men in all three cultures, more than women, reported that they would experience greater distress when a rival surpassed them on the dimensions of: • financial prospects, job prospects, and physical strength. • Women in all three cultures, more than men, reported greater distress when a rival had: • more attractive face or a more desirable body.

Gender and Management • Women make up: • 38% of first or mid-level managers • 29% of executive or senior-level managers • Of Fortune 500 Firms: • 1.8% of CEOs • 9.4% of highest clout positions (executive VP and above) • 6.4% of highest paid positions

Gender Differences in Leadership? • Overall, research has been inconclusive • Slight tendency for women to be more • Transformational • Person-oriented • Communal • Men tend to display more traditional leadership qualities • Transactional • Task-oriented • Agentic

Gender Stereotypes and Leadership • There is a definite gap between what observers perceive as leaders and what they perceive as female (Eagly & Karau 2002). • The idea of “think-manager-think-male” • There is usually a similarity between the traits defined as masculine and the traits defined as manager, while there is little overlap between feminine traits and managerial traits. • Traditional views hold that masculine traits are the behavioral norm for leadership positions. • Consequently, men are seen as better, “natural” leaders while women are forced to adopt masculine behaviors to fit into male-dominated organizational settings.

Role Congruity Theory • Expectations & attributions for male vs. female managers • Unfavorable evaluations of a woman’s actual leadership behavior can result from the perceived violation of gender roles. • When women become leaders they can face negative evaluations because they fail to conform to cultural expectations of femininity (Eagly & Karau, 2002). • Females in leadership positions face prejudice from a perceived violation of their gender role • Studies have shown that everything else being equal, men are simply viewed as being more effective leaders than women (Johnson, Murphy, Selamawit, & Reichard, 2008). • Less positive attitudes are associated with female leaders than with male leaders.

Leader and Subordinate Gender

Evolutionary Theory • Van Vugt and Spisak (2008) used evolutionary theory to explain differing perceptions of male and female leadership. • Female leaders were perceived as better leaders than male leaders when competition came from within the group, meaning women were preferred for maintaining intragoup relationships. • Male leaders were rated better than female leaders when competition was between groups. • Suggests that gender preferences for leaders can vary depending on the conflict: either internal or external. • A male leadership prototypes (i.e., competitive) and female leadership prototype (i.e., communal) can be activated depending on the context.

Leadership Style & Job Stress • Women in male-dominated industries face pressures different from those faced by men in the same jobs • or by women and men in more female-dominated environments • Women in male-dominated industries were equally interpersonally oriented compared to men in those industries • in contrast to managers in female-dominated industries where women were more interpersonally oriented than men. • The only factor which had a greater impact for women managers in male-dominated industries, compared with women in female-dominated industries, was discrimination. • Related to experiences such as • colleagues of the opposite sex being treated more favorably • feeling that one's sex is a disadvantage when it comes to career progress

Leadership Style, Job Stress, & Mental Health • Neither women in general, nor women in male-dominated industries, experienced worse psychological health than men. • Leaders in male-dominated industries reported worse psychological health than managers in female-dominated industries. • May mean that larger pressures affect women and men in male-dominated industries equally

Gender, Organizational Status, and Workplace Anger Expression • Females are socialized to approach and express their anger indirectly and passively • Males are taught to keep a stiff upper lip and remain emotionally inexpressive • But, the are permitted, and perhaps expected, to display their anger directly, if not aggressively. • Anger control was the most frequently reported form of expression across all respondents

Anger Expression • Differences in the outward expression of anger were non-significant • Although men reported outwardly expressing their anger more frequently than did females • Lower status males reported expressing their anger more frequently than did their female counterparts • Employees with lower status were more likely to outwardly and upwardly express their anger than were higher status members likely to outwardly direct their anger downward • Employees of both sexes and at both high and low levels of the hierarchy reported controlling their anger and holding their anger in when in the presence of those at a different status level

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Individual Differences: Age & Gender