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Knowledge transfer in age‐diverse coworker dyads in China and Germany: How and when do age‐inclusive human resource practices have an effect?
Author(s) -
Burmeister Anne,
Heijden Beatrice,
Yang Jie,
Deller Jürgen
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
human resource management journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.44
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1748-8583
pISSN - 0954-5395
DOI - 10.1111/1748-8583.12207
Subject(s) - diversity (politics) , individualism , china , psychology , collectivism , age groups , knowledge transfer , test (biology) , perspective (graphical) , demography , social psychology , demographic economics , geography , sociology , political science , ecology , biology , economics , management , archaeology , artificial intelligence , anthropology , computer science , law
Knowledge transfer between age‐diverse employees is gaining importance because of demographic change. We took a relational perspective to examine the indirect effect of human resource practices on knowledge transfer through age‐diversity climate in age‐diverse coworker dyads and contextualised our model by testing country difference and dyadic age difference as moderators. We used data from 159 age‐diverse coworker dyads from China and Germany to test our hypotheses. We found that perceived age‐inclusive human resource practices were positively associated with knowledge sharing and receiving through age‐diversity climate. However, we did not find support for our hypothesis that these indirect effects differed when comparing China and Germany as examples of collectivist and individualist countries. Furthermore, we did not identify the proposed moderating effects of dyadic age difference as the indirect effects of age‐inclusive human resource practices were not significantly different for age‐diverse coworker dyads in which dyadic age difference was high (vs. low).