BIO
Donald M. Truxillo is a Professor at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, Ireland; Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Trento, Italy; and Professor Emeritus at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, USA. He studies age differences at work, the applicant experience, and workplace safety and health. In the arena of age in the workplace, his current research focuses on age discrimination, work ability, and perceptions that relate to people’s successful aging at work. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the SHRM Foundation, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. He served as associate editor for the Journal of Management, is currently an associate editor at Work, Aging and Retirement, and is a member of nine editorial boards. He is the author of over 140 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and has coauthored two textbooks. He has received three Fulbright grants and is a fellow of APA, APS, SIOP, and IAAP.
Preliminary title
Work Ability and Successful Aging at Work
Abstract
The workforce in industrialized countries is aging due to longer lifespans and later retirement ages. For these reasons, organizations, researchers, and policymakers are increasingly interested in the concept of successful aging at work, that is, how to support workers’ well-being, performance, and motivation across their work lifespan. One marker of successful aging at work is work ability, which is a person’s ability or their perceived ability to meet their job’s requirements. Although the work ability concept was originally developed in the occupational medicine literature (Ilmarinen, 1991), it has recently gained attention in the organizational sciences, due to its relationship with outcomes such as well-being, performance, turnover, work disability, and retirement. Further, organizational psychology research has provided a theoretical basis for the work ability construct using JD-R theory, identifying the individual and organizational antecedents of work ability and differentiating work ability from established variables such as person-job fit and self-efficacy. Organizational researchers have also developed psychometrically sound measures of work ability, including multi-dimensional measures of the construct. In this session, I will discuss this work ability research in the organizational sciences and the value of understanding work ability across the lifespan. I will also discuss work ability’s implications for organizational policy and interventions and conclude with a discussion of future research questions.