Leadership in times of the demographic change (PDF)

In many industrialized countries, it can be seen that there is a trend to a growing market of knowledge-intensive goods and services. Due to a merging world, shorter product life-cycles and a permanent business streamlining, the need for skilled workers is growing. Nevertheless, not all companies have already recognized this need. Nowadays, it can bring huge competitive advantages when employees use their innovation potential in order to increase their efficiency. The daily work supplies employees with a greater potential of using their creativity for the working processes. This in turn can lead to a greater commitment to the company. Employees will put more efforts into solving work related problems by using their creativity and innovation-potential. Besides, a high labour turnover rate causes high costs because it takes time until new employees are trained. Based on this, it is reasonable to create a high commitment by understanding the needs of every employee. The way of fulfilling the diverse motives is attended by different generations which raise the challenge of meeting everybody's needs. The different classification will be explained within this thesis in detail.
As a consequence of demographic, social and economic developments, the resources of young talents in the labour market are steady decrease which will continue in the future. By this reason the employer attraction and the duty of creating a high commitment of qualified staff plays already an important role for the business success. Due to a low birth rate and an aging population, the German population has shrunken for the last decades which already affected the labour market. This created new challenges for the economy and the organisations. Hence, companies are under high pressure to find and implement appropriate actions in the so-called war for talents. One of the main problems refers to fight for young talents and to deal with increasing value diversity. At this point, a change on the part of the corporate strategy of organizations is required. Taking a closer look on this modification, the Human Resources strategy needs to be reviewed.