The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork for a large-scale prescriptive research project on organizing intergenerational communities of practice as a way to help organizations deal with some of the problems an ageing worker population brings with it. After a definition of the problem, a review of four seminal works on communities of practice was done to see if organizing intergenerational communities of practice might in fact be a viable solution to the problems of an ageing organizational population. Results are encouraging and lead to the conclusion that management might start to consider organizing these communities as a way to shed new light on older workers.
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The workforce in the EU is ageing, and this requires investment in older workers so that the organisations in which they work remain competitive and viable. One such investment takes the form of organising and facilitating intergenerational learning: learning between and among generations that can lead to lifelong learning, innovation and organisational development. However, successfully implementing intergenerational learning is complex and depends on various factors at different levels within the organisation. This multidisciplinary literature review encompasses work from the fields of cognitive psychology, occupational health, educational science, human resource development and organisational science and results in a framework that organisations can use to understand how they can create the conditions needed to ensure that the potential of their ageing workforce is tapped effectively and efficiently. Although not a comprehensive review, this chapter serves as a basis for further empirical research and gives practitioners an insight into solving a growing problem.
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This literature review explores ways older workers might continue to make waves and impact their work organization. The topic of the paper is grounded in the problem of an ageing organizational population looming in the near future. The work presented here is a start to helping management in knowledge-intensive organizations to understand how to effectively utilize the capacities of older knowledge workers by stimulating intergenerational learning as a means to retain critical organizational knowledge, encourage innovation and promote organizational learning through knowledge building. First, the concept of intergenerational learning is developed followed by a discussion of the organizational factors important for it to take place. The last section presents ideas on how to design and implement intergenerational learning as an organizational development program.
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