Different Shades of Discriminatory Effects of Age Stereotypes in the Workplace: A Multilevel and Dynamic Perspective on Organizational Behaviors

Age-related stereotypes in the workplace are assumed to hamper the employment of older workers (Bytheway, 2005; Oude Mulders, 2020; Perry & Finkelstein, 1999), yet Murphy and DeNisi (2021) challenged this view mainly due to scarce and inconsistent findings. In this commentary, we argue that a lack of evidence for the relationship between age stereotypes and personnel decisions does not imply a nondiscriminatory work environment. When limiting the interest to the narrow category of “personnel decisions,” we ignore other areas where age discrimination occurs and restrict our ability to understand the underlying mechanisms. This commentary makes three points. First, we argue that detecting and conceptualizing mechanisms of age discrimination can benefit from taking a multilevel organizational perspective. Accounting for the organizational structure and hierarchy helps to understand how discrimination develops in connection to age-related stereotypes and how it affects older employees in direct and indirect ways. Second, age discrimination should not only be conceived as direct or “hard discrimination” in personnel decisions. Age-related stereotypes can also trigger more subtle practices, such as hearing an ageist comment or being treated with no respect because of age (Harris et al., 2018; Solem, 2016; Stypińska & Turek, 2017). Although less evident, they are common and detrimental for older workers (Rahn et al, 2021; Vickerstaff & Van der Horst, 2021). We discuss how hard, soft, and self-discrimination can be linked to age-related stereotypes through different multilevel mechanisms.