Productively Managing Age Heterogenous Teams: The Moderation of Transformational Leadership

This paper addresses the role of age diversity in relation to productive energy of work teams. In a second step, transformational leadership is tested as a moderator of this process. Based on social identity and similarity/attraction theory, age heterogeneous teams should show a lower level of productive energy than do homogeneous teams. In teams with high perceived transformational leadership, this effect should be reversed.
Study hypotheses were tested on a sample of 664 individuals in 72 teams from a multinational company. Study participants were from company sites in four countries. Results showed a negative relation between age diversity and teams' productive energy only in a marginally significant manner, which vanished when controls were included. In contrast, the moderation effect of transformational leadership was found to be significant as well as the association between transformational leadership and productive energy. In sum, these results point toward transformational leadership as a promising strategy to manage age heterogeneous teams productively. The paper concludes by discussing practical implications and limitations of the study as well as possible directions for future research.