As a supervisor I could observe myself and my other older employees and conclude that one of the problems with older employees is they have seen "too much" throughout their careers. They have capped out in their classification level and they are tired of watching younger employees and managers repeat the same mistakes they have seen many times throughout their careers. They can become cynical, unimaginative, and basically have an "attitude problem".
Similar to comments above, I had to let go of an older employee who finally got tired of his 2 hr (each way) commute. He was a classical case of an employee who called in sick on too many Mondays and Fridays. When we confronted him he admitted what his problem was. He was gone from my group in a couple of months.
Older employees have their issues as do younger employees.
I was not cynical, unimaginative nor did I have an attitude problem....
I will give an example... my dept wanted to scan all documents so others could 'see' them... I asked many questions about indexing, how things would get scanned etc. etc.... I told them their plan would not work... (BTW, this was 1999 so computers were pretty slow then)...
So, one day the lady who sat in the office next to me came in and asked why I had such a problem with the scanning (she was on the team).... I used 3 examples of what I would need to look at any scanned document... I told her if you cannot get the doc in front of me faster than 'this' (I showed her how long it took me), then scanning is no help to me... the avg time for me to get info was less than 1 minute... it took an avg of 10 minutes to get to a scanned doc...
Now, they did implement scanning.... and guess who was the ONLY person who scanned all their docs and all their work papers
? After 6 months the dept was so behind in scanning that they hired 10 to 15 people to just scan things in.... nobody used the scanned docs because the more that was scanned in meant it was harder to find anything..... remember, there was no stated method of what to call things and no order to put them in.... you had to keep looking for something until you ran across it...
They abandoned the system after two years and millions of dollars (I think upward of $50 mill)....
Yes, I was seen as not a team player.... I refused to work more than 60 hours in a week... but I also had 4X more accounts than the second highest employee... my required payments were 10X more than the second highest... so they put up with me...