Most Western societies face the challenge of steadily ageing workforces. In recent decades, research on ageing has intensively focused on the subjective age concept to understand the challenges and risks of increasingly ageing workforces. Nevertheless, the subjective age construct is subject to several conceptual uncertainties, namely, regarding its stability and potential work-speciଏc drivers of subjective age. We address these limitations by a) investigating the stability of subjective age in a worker sample, and b) identifying work-speciଏc drivers (e.g., negative work events, positive work events, work stress) of subjective age perceptions. Building on social identity and lifespan theories, we test our conceptual assumptions with an online sample of 168 U.S. employees, applying growth curve modelling in a daily diary study over one workweek. Results indicate that subjective age is a mutable construct and varies between-and within-person in the course of a workweek. We identify positive work events and work stress as between-person drivers and negative work events as a within-person driver of subjective age. We discuss theoretical implications of these ଏndings as well as consequences for practitioners.

Organizations in the twenty-first century face the challenges of an increasingly ageing workforce, which have an effect on organizational health and productivity. As chronological age has shown to be an insufficient indicator of employees' health and, in particular, absenteeism, we apply the subjective age concept (i.e., how old an employee feels) at the team-level to explain the average chronological age/ average short-term absenteeism relationship. We develop a theoretical framework for underlying processes, combining the subjective age research with the socioemotional selectivity theory and team contagion processes. We test our predictions in a time-lagged team-level sample of 1,015 teams with 12,926 employees to find a significant interactive effect of average chronological age and average subjective age on average short-term absenteeism in teams. The relationship is negative and significant when average subjective age is low. Under high-average subjective age, the relationship is non-significant. Furthermore, this interactive effect (average chronological age/average subjective age) is moderated by job type (white versus blue collar) in the form of a three-way interaction, indicating that the effect is only significant among white collar teams. We hope to enrich the theoretical debate on age and absenteeism and provide organizations with a new perspective on ageing work teams.

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