Older workers not trusted by younger colleagues claims survey
LOS ANGELES: Older workers are not trusted by their younger colleagues when they hold similar positions, as they make unfair assumptions about their usefulness, Queensland research has revealed.
They are stereotyped as less competent, trainable, or adaptable by their younger colleagues, who can be reluctant to collaborate with them.
But when older workers share their voice to help solve problems — showing the expertise they’ve built over years — that trend reverses.
University of Queensland Business School Associate Professor Chad Chiu said his team’s research showed older workers should not be shy to speak up when they’re being constructive.
“You’re actually making suggestions to move the team forward,” Dr Chiu said.
“If you are an older worker, but you keep yourself quiet, people will think you’re not trustable.”
He said it is a pre-existing prejudice younger workers show to their older colleagues, but speaking up without being helpful does not remove the bias — only effectively showing your expertise.
The study surveyed workplaces in Australia and Taiwan, finding consistent evidence across the two different cultures that younger workers are less trusting of their older colleagues.
In Taiwan, that included 199 employees across 56 professional consulting and technology firms.
For the Australian context, 177 participants aged 22 and older were given a scenario of a 55-year-old engineer responding to an urgent production issue, and asked to assess their capability.
Mr Chiu said younger people expressed lower levels of trust in the older engineer.
“They may have thought of them as a nice or supportive colleague, but they didn’t see them as useful.”
It’s the responsibility of management to create a space where all employees feel confident and safe to voice their concerns and step in, Dr Chiu said.
“When younger employees receive very little information about their older colleagues’ capabilities, they will primarily rely on surface-level characteristics like age to make a judgment.”
As workplaces adopt AI, able to give faster but less reliable answers to questions, Dr Chiu believes the prejudice will become worse.
“People are more impatient towards giving others a more proper evaluation,” Dr Chiu said.
But there is a potential upside — the knowledge held by older, experienced workers is only going to become more important as wisdom is needed to judge whether the chatbots’ answers are accurate or not, he said.
He said discrimination was not tied to any specific age group, and he was not aware of differences between Millennials (born 1981 to 1996) or Generation Z (born 1997 to 2012).
“Age discrimination is not about your absolute age, it’s how old you are compared to others” Dr Chiu said.