The management literature provides a variety of recommendations as to how workers' customer orientation might be improved, including through training. Crucial factors in the process of transferring the contents of service quality training programs to practice, however, have not yet been sufficiently analysed. This study proposes and tests a model of transfer motivation and training transfer via structural equation modelling, validating Baldwin and Ford's framework and Kirkpatrick's levels of evaluation. Following the recommendation of Alliger et al., the present study analyses the relationship between Kirkpatrick's levels of evaluation, paying attention to the specificity of the measures at each level. The survey collects data from 213 German bank employees who attended a training program aimed at improving service quality. As hypothesized, the perceived practical relevance of the training was found to exert a strong influence on the reaction of the participants and had a substantial total effect on the motivation to transfer and on actual transfer. Subject to the limitations of the research methodology employed here, it is concluded that trainee satisfaction needs to be conceptually distinguished from perceived practical relevance and that the latter is the main driving force for transfer motivation and transfer.

Based on a new model of productivity in age diverse tams, ¿ndings from a six-year research program are reported in which data from more than 745 natural teams with 8,848 employees in three different ¿elds (car production, administrative work, ¿nancial services) were collected. Moreover, central assumptions of this model were tested with a representative survey of the German workforce (N = 2,000). Results support both signi¿cant advantages and disadvantages for age-mixed teams. Based on the findings, the following preconditions for the effectiveness of age diverse teams are identi¿ed: high task complexity, low salience and high appreciation of age diversity, a positive team climate, low age-discrimination, ergonomic design of work places, and the use of age differentiated leadership. Based on these insights, we developed a new training for supervisors, which addresses the aforementioned aspects and seeks to improve team performance and health of team members. It was found that the training reduces age stereotypes, team conflicts and enhances innovation. Thus, we can conclude that effective interventions for a successful integration of elderly employees in work groups are available and that combinations of measures that address ergonomic design issues, team composition and leadership are to be strongly recommended for practice.

Applying social identity theory and the relational demography approach, this paper proposes that the effect of age diversity on individual team members' health is contingent on the individual age as well as on age stereotypes. We suggest that younger and older employees' health is negatively associated with age diversity, while middle-aged team members' health is not affected. We further postulate that age stereotypes strengthen the negative effect of age diversity for the younger age group, while they weaken the effect for older employees. For middle-aged team members, age stereotypes are expected not to determine the relationship between age diversity and health. We tested our hypotheses based on data from a representative sample of the German workforce (n = 1,214). The results fully confirmed our hypotheses.

Abstract. Lockdown regulations during the COVID-19 outbreak resulted in abrupt changes to work situations and presented new leadership challenges. This short report explores how leaders perceived their options for leading transformationally when their teams were forced to rapidly switch to virtual collaboration. We interviewed 20 supervisors using semistructured telephone interviews who described their general leadership behavior before the lockdown and the evaluated possibilities and difficulties of leading transformationally during the lockdown. The article provides insights into the preconditions for transformational leadership in the public sector during change processes. High workload, time pressure, and role conflicts, combined with restricted freedom of action, restrained their options of transformational leadership. Communicative problems further hindered the transfer of transformational leadership behavior to new working arrangements during the Covid-19-crisis. The article derives implications for ways of helping managers to employ the potentials of transformational leadership in virtual settings and during change processes in the public sector.

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