Work Motivation of Older Workers: A Case Study from Bangladesh

Demographic shift becomes a major problem as ratio of older people is increasing in the total population of world and that leads to more number of older workforces in the total labour force which should be a blessing due to how importance older workers have at workplace. But instead of blessing, the increased number of older workforces becomes a curse for many developed and developing countries due to low participation of these older workers to work at workplace mainly because of voluntary early retirement from the work and young workers are not replacing older workers proportionately that might lead to shortage of labor supply in near future which has serious economic and social consequences. Bangladesh is not free from such problem as recent trend shows that the rate of participation of older workers in the total workforce is in declining rate and 60% of the total workforce consists of middle age and older workers. One of many ways to retain these large numbers of older workers to work at workplace is to motivate them to work. But contrasting result in this study shows that if research is not being conducted in the area of work motivation of older workers then Bangladesh might suffer from serious economic and social consequences in future that are not desirable.