Christoph Klaus Streb

• The demographic change in many western industrialized societies' populations points to one of the most negative future scenarios in business management: The increasing average age mirrored in the workforce and labor pool. In an industry that relies on physical work performance as an important input factor, such as automobile mass production, this will lead to a workforce that is limited in terms of employability and is thus more expensive, since organizations have to cover absenteeism and/or the loss of value creation on production lines. Empirical evidence demonstrates that increased costs, a lack of flexibility, as well as increased global demands in terms of productivity have resulted in a potential threat to sustainable competitiveness. The successful management of an aging workforce is an evolving field of research that has to date provided little on which advanced studies could be built. This dissertation therefore aims to approach the topic of aging workforce management in the automobile industry in an exploratory manner, clarifying fundamental concepts that have been neglected by managerial sciences, but that are, in fact, elementary and crucial for the development of sound research in future. To achieve this aim, this dissertation presents the cumulated results of three articles, that 1. identify the status quo of the aging workforce management from a management science perspective in theory and practice, 2. provide answers regarding how the aging workforce challenge as a topic and the elements that constitute its management can be defined, and 3. evaluate the effectiveness of applied aging workforce measures in practice.