Individuals unite to form groups or organizations with the purpose of winning the fight for survival. In metropolitan societies of the world today, survival is in psychological or economic sense rather than in plain physical terms.
In the process of organizational living, people develop “locus of control” – that is, assumptions about responsibility for events. A person, who has an internal locus of control, operates on the premise that they are personally able to maximize good outcomes and to minimize the bad. Individuals exhibit an external locus of control with the belief that they are at the mercy of fate, authority and other uncontrollable outside forces.
These attributions of responsibility provide momentum to people’s life motivations. The infusion of creative energy enables the achievement of goals generally perceived impossible. Equally, the impetus may fall by the wayside with doubts about individual competencies.
During the last century, dramatic improvements in life expectancy have been achieved in many countries around the world. On the average, longevity has moved from the 40s to the 60s or more. Reasons for the phenomenon, referred to by experts as the ‘age wave’, is improvements in healthcare and living standards.
However, although people are having longer life spans, they are less likely to be constructively involved in work during the later years. In addition, the habits that people tend to carry with them into older age - where their cumulative impact becomes noticeable - have been classified as ‘unhealthy’.
Thus, in middle and late adulthood, people tend to become increasingly unproductive as well as illness-prone (increased risk of heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, depression, bone fractures, diabetes, arthritis, unfitness, etc). Slowly but surely, people appear to give up on life with advancing age.
Many if not most people associate the word ‘old’ with ‘useless’. Having reached a particular age milestone, there is a social expectation of redundancy that leave few options open. Some attempt to extend the visual perceptions of ‘youth’ through surgery and hormone replacement therapies; the majority succumbs to the collective expectation.
The negative mindset on ageing performance is active in standards 'falling' across generations. Within organizations, measures are set against established standards. The ageing individual’s present performance may be of quality by itself, but when compared to these ‘standards’ they may appear to be coming up short.
For people who have grown within the system, the standard references frequently are their own records set in younger days. The lack of appropriate generational role models for the ageing and the unavailability of precedence also factor in the decreasing performance recorded.
It is true that athletes and other sportspersons, for example, show comparatively diminishing speed, ability to recuperate and physiological responses to training with age. That said, it is also true that patience, wisdom and technical expertise that are more crystallized with age, rarely show up in the tests.
Cross-sectional comparisons or even evaluations against one’s own earlier work may actually de-motivate present performance. The individual tends to lose confidence on being compared, believing that despite their unstinted efforts, their present outputs will never be rated good enough.
Some researchers challenge test inferences that differences recorded between age groups are solely the result of ageing. Younger subjects may score higher than middle-aged subjects not because they are more intelligent, but because of such variables as more formal education, better nutrition and greater childhood exposure to television and new technology.
Besides, younger people have more relevant experience of standardized test taking. The higher scores they obtain may then represent generational or cohort effects as opposed to specific effects of ageing. Thus, organizational standards that depend on perceptions of youth and standardized learning, fail to appreciate increased maturity.
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