Adapting employee appraisals to avoid age discrimination & lift the “Silver Ceiling”
11/25/2025
4 min
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Older employees often face barriers that unfairly hinder their career advancement, referred to as the “silver ceiling”. Managerial stereotypes and subtle forms of age discrimination can lead to workers as young as 48 being systematically overlooked for promotions. In the context of aging workforces and people staying longer in the workforce, the silver ceiling poses a significant challenge to organizations and society more broadly. A new study sheds new light on why this ceiling exists and outlines how companies can adapt employee appraisals to avoid discriminating against older workers and ensure they can better identify talent.
A 2020 survey by Robert Walters among 7,500 professionals found that, within the first 3 years of working for an organization, significantly fewer employees aged 40 and older (47%) received promotions compared to those aged 25-39 (65%).
A team of researchers from IÉSEG, KU Leuven (Belgium), and Kühne Logistics University (Germany) have been studying why older workers (over 45) may be overlooked for promotions. They were particularly interested in the role of one particular type of employee appraisal used in many large organizations: potential appraisals.
As opposed to performance appraisals – which assess an employee’s past contribution in their current role – appraisals of potential refer to evaluations of employees’ ability to perform successfully in more complex and advanced job roles in the future. In essence, they help companies identify talent for future roles that is already ‘in-house’.
In practice, many large organizations ask managers to simultaneously rate employees’ potential and performance using a 9-box grid. In this grid, managers need to indicate whether employees’ performance and potential are low, medium, or high, respectively, on the X– and Y-axis, creating a 3-by-3 matrix with nine cells. Talents are typically located in the upper right cell of the 9-box grid formed by a combination of high potential and high performance. This grid forces managers to distinguish between performance and potential as raters often have the tendency to treat both as nearly identical.
“In our field study in a large company we found that ‘potential appraisals’ are an important piece of the puzzle as they can be a potent pathway for age bias to affect promotion decisions,” explains Giverny DE BOECK, professor at IÉSEG and lead author of the study. “Put simply, when managers have negative stereotypes about older workers, they are more likely to give them lower potential ratings which, in turn, will reduce older employees’ likelihood to get promoted in the next year.”
Why is this a problem?
In their study, the researchers found that this mechanism already affects workers as young as 48.
“This is a worrying phenomenon – companies may run the risk of completely overlooking a considerable pool of talent which has considerable experience and still many years ahead of them in their careers. And with people working longer – either through choice or due to changes enforced by governments – this pool is going to get even bigger over the next years,” explains Melvyn HAMSTRA, professor at IÉSEG and co-author of the study.
“Furthermore, if older workers feel they have been unfairly treated in the promotion decision-making process they are less likely to be committed to the company which may undermine their engagement and performance”.
Finally, the experts argue that the issue of the silver ceiling is also a crucial issue for workers who are looking to switch careers at a later age.
What can organizations do about it? – 4 steps to consider
“The solution is not to completely abolish potential appraisals given they can still be valuable in decision-making, particularly when used to complement performance appraisals,” adds Professor DE BOECK. “However, to ensure that potential appraisals are useful, organizations need to make sure that they provide relevant, unbiased information about employees’ ability to successfully perform in more complex and advanced roles soon.”
According to Professors DE BOECK and HAMSTRA there are four steps that companies can take:
1) Ask managers to account for their potential ratings to help break any unintentional stereotypes.
Specifically, organizations should ask managers to explain how they evaluated the potential of each of their employees. Managers can do so by making explicit the type of information they used during the appraisal process and for which reasons.
2) Specify what kind of potential managers are being asked to assess.
Managers should be trained to apply consistent definitions of what constitutes low versus high potential within organizations. However, this requires organizations to first answer the question “potential for what?”.
3) Adapting methods/processes used.
Instead of using a general abstract measurement of potential (like the 9-box grid), companies can consider opting for more concrete measurements using behaviorally anchored questions. Rather than asking managers to use a single global potential rating (low, medium, high), organizations should list specific competences to measure employees’ potential. For instance, managers can assess learning agility—a typical ‘potential’ competence—by answering the question below based on employees’ observed behavior:
“When faced with an unfamiliar task, how does this employee typically react?”
- Low: avoids the new task, insists on doing it the usual way, or becomes visibly frustrated when faced with the unfamiliar.
- Moderate: tries out the new task with some effort, uses feedback when prompted, but may revert to old habits if challenged.
- High: approaches the new task with curiosity, actively seeks feedback, and adjusts methods based on what they learn.
4) Track and analyze company data:
HR departments can track and analyze company data to see if there are systematic demographic differences in potential ratings that cannot be explained rationally. If companies find such differences, they can scrutinize the appraisal process and conduct interviews with relevant stakeholders to explore underlying causes. Organizations can then use this information to make structural improvements, of which the results can be monitored further with new data.
The full study :
Why Is the Ceiling Silver? Uncovering the Role of Potential Appraisals in the Age–Promotion Relationship (Personnel Pyschology, 2025)
Giverny De Boeck (IÉSEG), Melvyn R. W. Hamstra (IÉSEG), Nicky Dries (KU Leuven/BI Norwegian Business School), Prisca Brosi (Kühne Logistics University).
The image accompanying this article has been generated with Sora (OpenAI).
