The Age of Employees as A Determinant of Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer - Experience of Polish Enterprises

The purpose of the article is to find out the relationship between the age of employees and their perception of intergenerational knowledge transfer in an organization. The article is based on the assumption that effective knowledge management requires a flow of knowledge between employees. This applies especially to employees from different generational groups, i.e. people with varied professional and life experiences. The first part of this paper presents the importance and limitations of knowledge transfer in an organization. Next, various generations on the contemporary labour market were described. The survey research was conducted among 895 employees, representing 829 business entities. On this basis, the final conclusions were formulated which show that the age of respondents influences their perception of knowledge transfer in organizations. Significant differences in the assessment of knowledge exchange made by the representatives of different age groups based on a clear tendency to more positively assess own generation group have been noticed. The research presented in this article does not allow for a clear conclusion which generation is more involved in the intergenerational exchange of knowledge since the assessment of the openness of employees to share knowledge depends on the age of those who evaluate it. Representatives of the baby boomers generation highly assess their readiness to share knowledge, but the perception of younger age groups does not confirm this phenomenon. Due to the limitation of research to Polish enterprises, we treat their results as preliminary and requiring continuation.