Future research
We see several implications for future research. First, perceived FFM may be a useful framework for examining age stereotypes in organizations. Future research should see whether these personality- and performance-based stereotypes of older and younger workers translate into different decisions being made about them in the workplace. Specifically, we think that these stereotypes may not only affect the valence of decisions made about older and younger workers (i.e. positive versus negative), but also have a differential impact on different types of decisions (e.g. for different types of jobs, for training versus selection versus team membership). Second, age of the rater should also be taken into consideration in research regarding age stereotypes, as intergroup bias seemed to be at play in these studies. Third, as suggested by Kulik et al. (2007), future research should take into consideration other demographic variables such as gender. For example, it would be interesting to investigate perceived personality of older men and women. Moreover, future research should examine what is meant by “older” and “younger” workers, as there is no a clear consensus about these categories (cf. Finkelstein and Farrell, 2007).