Browsing by Subject "ikääntymisilmiö"

Goals: Aging population is a global and a social challenge to business life. Due to aging workforce, organizations need to adjust and adapt to this changing social structure. One of organization's ways to manage this phenomenon is age leadership, which means those policies and practices that organizations use to control, or possibly even benefit from aging workforce. The dominant perspective to age leadership has been human resources management. This study is taking the perspective of transformational leadership theory and focuses on the interactional relationship between the leader and the subordinate. Because the concept of age leadership has multiple meanings and it holds a lot of conceptual confusion, this study aims to describe what age leadership is and what form it takes in organizational practices. In this study, my aim is to describe what age leadership is, and what challenges and possibilities the leaders of today's organization see in age leadership. Methods: This is a qualitative research. The data was collected by using theme interview as a data collection method. For this study, I interviewed 11 leaders from both private and public sectors. I selected the interviewees so that I would have a heterogenic sample. The data from the interviews was analyzed by using content analysis. This research uses mostly theory driven content analysis. Some of the analysis benefits also from inductive analysis. Results: The research findings give a comprehensive view on what today's age leadership is and what are its challenges and possibilities in the framework of transformational leadership. The research showed that age leadership is divided into individual interaction and organizational policies and practices. Age leadership has a significant effect on organizations' performance and it has a positive effect on work well being as well. According to this study, the challenges of age management are performance driven mentality, negative age attitudes and problems regarding motivation and change. This research shows that transformational leadership is an important part of age management. This is a significant finding, because it highlights the importance of the interactional relationship between the leader and the subordinate. According to these research findings, I have divided age leadership into different micro-, macro- and meso levels, in order to conceptualize the content of age leadership and clarify the conceptual confusion. These research findings can be used in organizations to map age leadership and its goals and challenges.