Dissertation_Paula Aleksandrowicz_12 ... - Jacobs University

European corporation which is very active in the field of age management in the country of
origin, those innovative HRM policies have not spread to the Polish subsidiary. That points
to the determining power of ´host country´ (as opposed to ´country of origin´) effects
(Edwards 2004), and to the importance of institutional and structural/socio-economic
factors in the given country setting (above all, the rapid transformation process
accompanied by downsizing).
My assessment of age management and the degree to which the personnel policy
externalises or integrates ´50pluses´ is biased in favour of firms with a stable employment
situation. A telling example of that bias is Firm PL-11. During communism, it had a
complex system of social benefits for all workers, subsidies to extramural education, and
extensive in-house further training and health care services. Those regulations are codified
in the Collective Agreement, which however contains a passage that measures are
contingent on the financial standing of the establishment. In the interview period, only
occupational safety training and regular health check-ups prescribed by law were provided,
and older workers were excluded from further training due to high costs and shorter payback
period. Therefore, the motor vehicle company achieved the lowest measures with
regard to the integration of older workers (Table 23).
Besides of the lacking focus on the ageing of the workforce (HRM strategy instead of
age management strategy), Polish firms are worse positioned than German firms in my
sample with regard to the integration of older workers. The vast number of firms occupied
the medium-internalising position and the medium-externalising position (Table 23), but
there were more firms in that second column, and two firms (Firm PL-11 and Firm PL-13)
with outright externalising policies.
No branch-specific positioning in the two dimensions depicted in Table 23 was visible,
which speaks in favour of hypothesis 5 (see section 2.2.). However, the existence or nonexistence
of country patterns in age management can be assessed only in a cross-national
comparison of the results of the German and Polish case studies. That task will be
undertaken in the following chapter 4.4.
4.4. Cross-national Comparison of Firm Case Studies
In this chapter, I will compare the results of the Polish and German firm case studies.
For comparative purposes, I will use condensed information cross-cutting across the four
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