My Take | Better for workers not to act their age

The tragedy of old age, wrote Oscar Wilde, is not that one is old but that one is young.

If he were alive today, the pessimistic Wilde might feel cheered up by new research in Germany.

In the workplace, your productivity is not tied to how old you actually are, but how old or young you feel yourself to be.

The paper, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, tracks the productivity of 15,000-plus workers from 107 German companies in diverse sectors. As we all know, ageing is subjective. We tend to feel younger and older than we actually are.

The paradox dissected in the German study is that younger workers - defined as those aged 25 or under - feel older, while older workers feel younger as they age.

By the time they reach 50, workers on average feel more than eight years younger than their actual age, according to the study as reported in the Financial Times.

So, companies, governments, bosses and employers, please take serious note: the older and more experienced workers who don't "feel their age" are more productive than those who do. The latter group can have lower productivity than their higher-performing peers by up to 6 per cent.