View article

Due to demographic change, age diversity is increasing in many organizations. We aimed to understand how organizations can use age diversity training to overcome the challenges and realize the benefits of an age-diverse workforce. We built on the two predominant theoretical perspectives in the diversity literature—social identity theory and the information and decision-making perspective—to advance a dual pathway model and develop two age diversity training programs: identity-oriented training that helps organizations to overcome the challenges of age diversity by “speaking to the heart” of age-diverse coworkers and knowledge-oriented training that helps organizations to realize the benefits of age diversity by “speaking to the mind” of age-diverse coworkers. We tested both training programs in a randomized controlled field experiment with age-diverse coworker dyads. We found that the identity-oriented …