Still feeling employable with growing age? Exploring the moderating effects of developmental HR practices and country-level unemployment rates in the age – employability relationship

A compelling issue for organizations and societies at large is to ensure employability of the workforce across workers’ entire work-life span. Using the frameworks of age norms, stereotyping and age meta-stereotypes, we investigate whether (a) age is negatively related to perceived external employability; and (b) the age-employability link is moderated by HR developmental practices (HRDPs) and unemployment rate. Using data collected in a largescale survey from over 9000 individuals in 30 institutionally diverse countries encompassing all of the GLOBE culture clusters, we found that the negative relationship between age and perceived external employability was significant across all countries. In addition, at the individual level, we found that HRDPs acted as a buffer for this negative relationship, such that the effect was less pronounced for individuals who have experienced more HRDPs during their working life. However, at the country level, the hypothesized moderating effect of unemployment rate was not observed. Limitations, future research directions, as well as practical implications of the study are discussed