Seizing the Benefits of Age Diversity: Could Empowering Leadership be the Answer?

Age diversity has the potential to offer significant competitive advantages in contemporary workplaces. However, surprisingly, many organizations fail to realize these benefits. Our research sheds light on these issues using an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. Study 1 involved an in-depth examination of semi-structured interviews with 16 older/younger workers about their perceptions of their younger/older managers’ leadership effectiveness. Using a blended grounded theory approach we found 15 leadership behaviors critical to the success of age-diverse work groups. In Study 2 (N = 214), we tested the impact of the two most prominent leadership models from Study 1, empowering leadership and transformational leadership, on the age-diversity- information elaboration-work group performance relationship. We also compared these effects for younger versus older leaders. The results suggest that empowering leadership is a potentially more promising leadership approach than transformational leadership i...