The article entitled The Myth of the Deficient Older Employee, published in the December 13, 2009, New York Times Magazine “The 9th Annual Year in Ideas” issue caught my eye – and apparently a lot of other eyes as well. It was a very popular blog topic this week around the internet among HR practitioners.

The takeaway message of the article is: “Older workers are commonly thought of as being less productive and less willing to learn than younger workers, as well as overly cautious. But this year economists presented a more nuanced picture than the above stereotypes suggest.”

Being a “senior” myself, I was of course interested. So I read on.

The article explained that The American Economic Review [June 2009] published the results of a study in which “seniors” (those over 50) were pitted against “juniors” (those under 30) in three different decision-making tasks: risk taking, competitiveness and cooperation. The results? According to the NYT: “In risk-taking, which the researchers assessed via an investing game, the seniors invested slightly more than the juniors. The seniors were also more cooperative, contributing more to their group during the cooperation test. The seniors outperformed the juniors on one competitive word game — and were only “very slightly less” competitive overall.”

Now I was not so sure. As much as I would have loved the study to be a resounding debunking of the myth that seniors are less productive, it sounded as though the comparisons were quite close. Yet, for me, I guess that a conclusion that seniors are not less productive is just about as good as a conclusion that seniors are clearly more productive.

I decided to dig a little deeper, so I read the report itself. It is entitled Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and in the Laboratory and you can find it at: http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pch205.htm.

Lo and behold, the authors are themselves quite cautious about their results. First, only 159 individuals were tested – 87 workers (from just 2 different manufacturing companies) and 72 non-workers (i.e., students and retirees). Second, the study was conducted in France “and clearly cannot claim to have identified a representative sample of the global working population,” say the authors. Third, “the experimental games and artificial tasks are only imperfect proxies for the work environment.”

So, the strongest conclusion they make from their study is: “[W]hile reasons for preferring younger applicants do exist, we are suggesting that hiring seniors may have advantages and that some of the perceived disadvantages may not be present.”

They go on to say “[W]e hope that our findings will lead to further study and help to influence policy regarding the employment and retention of senior workers.”

The senior population of course continues to grow. It is indeed important for companies to have empirical evidence on the issue of the value of the senior worker in the workplace. I hope that more studies are done – and that the results in fact demonstrate that seniors are not less productive than juniors.

Posted by Len Pasculli