Society Hill Reproductive Medicine

Despite the prominent use of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967 by employees to protect themselves from discrimination in terms of age, research has rarely examined the impact of the importance attached to legal compliance by organizations on outcomes related to older workers. We adopt the institutional logic perspective to better understand the relationship of strategic importance of ADEA compliance on two formal (i.e., accommodation and development practices) and one informal (i.e., age diversity climate) older worker-related organizational practices. Moreover, we extend our model to examine outcomes of the three organizational practices as related to the accumulation of older worker-specific human capital reservoir. To test our theoretical model, we analyze two-wave data from a random sample of active members of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM). We found that, organizations that attached high strategic importance to ADEA compliance were more likely to implement both formal and informal older worker-related organizational practices. We further found that development practices for older workers were positively related to knowledge transfer from older workers, and age diversity climate was negatively related to retention and recruitment difficulty of older workers, but positively related to knowledge transfer from older workers. Implications of these findings are discussed.