The Effects of Symbolic Immortality, Image Expectation and Life Development Stage on Employees' Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer Intention

Abstract

Abstract:

If organizations can promote older employees (senior employees) transfer their knowledge accumulated in the workplace to younger ones (junior ones), which is called intergenerational knowledge transfer (IGKT) in this paper, organization amnesia will be prevented, and up-to-date knowledge will be created. Based on the generativity theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, and the survey of 121 older employees who are older than 35 years old and staying in current organization for more than 3 years, this study analyzes the effects of symbolic immortality, image expectation and life development stage on IGKT intention of the older employees. The results show that, at the middle stage of adulthood, symbolic immortality and image expectation are positively associated with employees' IGKT intention, and image expectation can strength the effect of symbolic immortality on employees' IGKT intention. However, at the later stage of adulthood, symbolic immortality is not significantly associated with IGKT intention, older employees concern image expectation more. Compared with the employees who are at the middle stage of adulthood, the positive effect of image expectation on the employees who are at the later stage of adulthood is stronger. This study enriches IGKT theory, while expanding the application scope and the theoretical connotation of generativity theory. In addition, this study can give guidance to the organization managers to conduct IGKT.

Key words: intergenerational knowledge transfer (IGKT), symbolic immortality (SI), image expectation (IE), life development stage, generativity theory

Wang Changyu, Zuo Meiyun. The Effects of Symbolic Immortality, Image Expectation and Life Development Stage on Employees' Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer Intention[J]. , 2018, 30(4): 169-179.

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