thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Work Teams: A Multilevel Social Network Perspective
older employees should also transfer more knowledge because they are more willing to share
it.
There is a wealth of research demonstrating that age is related to several organizational
behaviors which are favorable in the light of organizational outcomes (for an overview see
Bowen, Noack, & Staudinger, 2010). First, beginning in midlife, intrinsic rewards become
more important at work (Penner, Perun, & Steuerle, 2002), and helping and sharing with
colleagues constitute such rewarding experiences. Thus, as employees age, their cost-benefit
ratio of transferring knowledge to colleagues seems to change in favor of sharing their
knowledge. Second, research has provided links between age and emotional stability
(Mroczek & Spiro, 2005; Staudinger, 2005), which in turn has been linked to job satisfaction
(e.g., Judge & Locke, 1993; Tokar & Subich, 1997; Watson & Slack, 1993). It can be
assumed that employees who are more satisfied with their job are more open to engage in
behaviors that are discretionary and not directly part of their core tasks, but beneficial for the
organization – such as knowledge transfer. This might especially be true for those who will
leave the company soon. Third, although age seems to be largely unrelated to task
performance according to meta-analytical evidence, a relationship exists between age and
organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB; Ng & Feldman, 2008). OCB is a form of non-core
task performance that is beneficial for organizations (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, &
Bachrach, 2000), but is neither job-specific nor directed at the job tasks as such. Examples of
OCB are helping coworkers, compliance with organizational norms, or voluntarily taking over
additional work (Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983) – and knowledge transfer could be considered
as a special form of such behavior.
Taken together, this research draws a picture of older workers as being sought out as
sources of knowledge more often than their younger colleagues as well as being more willing
to invest time and energy in personal interactions with their colleagues, to show helping
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