PhD student investigates impact of baby boomers' retirement

Work undertaken by a Canterbury University researcher is addressing the challenge the baby boomers’ retirement poses for many organisations.

Psychology PhD student Annette Dunham’s thesis, Organisational Memory and Mentoring within the Context of an Ageing Workforce, looks at the impact the upcoming retirement of the baby boomer generation (born 1946 to 1964) will have on knowledge management within organisations.

In a series of five studies, supported by a Tertiary Education Commission Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship, her research has investigated the relationship between an individual’s estimated level of organisational memory and their willingness to mentor others. She is being supervised by Associate Professor Chris Burt and Professor Simon Kemp (Psychology).

Annette said she had long had an interest in career transitions over the lifespan but attending a Managing the Ageing Workforce conference in Wellington in 2006 combined with a quote she later found in The Economist inspired her thesis topic.

“It read that ‘a survey of human resource directors by IBM (in 2005) concluded that when the baby boomer generation retires many companies will find out too late that a career’s worth of experience has walked out the door leaving insufficient talent to fill the void’.”

Annette said as she read more widely on the topic of our ageing workforce she began to realise that the potential loss of organisational memory was at stake.

“A lot of the knowledge older workers walk away with is the sort of knowledge that is very difficult to write down. It is knowledge of their organisations and industries gained over time, knowledge of the trusted work contacts they have built up, rules of thumb they have used in everyday work that they have learned through experience and possibly take for granted.

“Mentoring is often seen as a valuable way of passing on this information,” Annette said.

Her first two studies involved the development of a self-report scale of organisational memory and she is currently analysing the data and writing up the three studies that followed. These include a study utilising the newly developed scale to examine individual employee and organisational outcomes of organisational memory; an online questionnaire to examine the relationship between employee organisational memory and willingness to mentor, incorporating a costs and benefits approach; and a study examining several potential predictors of the willingness to return to the workplace to mentor in a sample of retired and semi-retired men and women.

While organisations recognise that many older workers possess valuable organisational memory, too often they assume these workers will readily divest themselves of that knowledge if given the opportunity. However, Annette said that employees in the possession of substantial organisational memory may not always be willing to divulge that knowledge to others.

“In the wake of recessions, large-scale redundancies and organisations going down the route of contract staff, workers can no longer depend on having a job for life. There is not the organisational loyalty to workers that there was back when early mentoring research was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Annette said a fear of exploitation may be one factor influencing older workers’ attitudes to mentoring.

“For most people the knowledge they’ve accumulated over that length of time becomes their niche, it becomes their marketing value or guarantee of employment.”

Other issues explored were how well the employee perceived they were supported by their organisation, how confident they were in their work, and concerns about the cost of time and effort involved in mentoring relationships.

Annette also looked at specific motivations older workers may have had for mentoring, such as the desire to leave a legacy for the next generation, returning the favour if they have been a protégé, personal satisfaction and personal reputation within the organisation.

Annette will give a presentation based on the organisational memory scale she has developed at the European Conference on Knowledge Management in Vicenza, Italy in September.