Age and Acceptance Of Workplace Accommodations : The Role of the Employee Social Context

In most developed countries, the workforce is aging. With increasing individual age, there is a higher chance to acquire health restrictions. Organizations typically react to these circumstances by providing health-related workplace accommodations. Prior research indicates that the effectiveness of workplace accommodations strongly relies upon stakeholders such as coworkers and their levels of acceptance. With regard to coworkers' fairness assessments of accommodations, recipients' characteristics play a major role. However, little is known about the impact of recipients' chronological age and its boundary conditions. In this study, I draw upon the literature on disability, age, and similarity attraction to propose a model of the relationship between an accommodation recipient's age and coworkers' accommodation acceptance. I then test this model using multi-source data on 144 accommodation recipients working for a large German manufacturing company. As hypothesized, I find that the relationship between a recipient age and coworker accommodation acceptance is conditioned by the social context. Age is positively related to coworkers' acceptance when there is age similarity between the individual and the workgroup and when there are no accommodated peers in the workgroup. Implications for research and practice are discussed.