Health and the intention to retire: exploring the moderating effects of human resources practices

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

Although health is among the strongest predictors of retirement timing, organizational effects on this relationship are largely unknown. Based on the theory of work adjustment and socioemotional selectivity theory, this study explores the role of human resources practices in the relation between older employees’ health and retirement intentions—specifically, their preferred retirement age and their intention to engage in late-career employment after being eligible for pension. Three groups of practices are distinguished: individual development practices (e.g. life-long learning and career development), practices tailoring the transition to retirement (e.g. phased retirement), and practices allowing to continue working in later life (e.g. individualized employment forms). We tested our model with multilevel data from 556 older employees and 661 managers from 101 organizations. Results suggest that healthy employees intend to retire later, if individual development practices are stronger pronounced in the organization. In addition, the positive relation between health and the intention to engage in late-career employment was stronger in organizations that provide more opportunities to continue working. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of retirement intentions and offer practical implications to shape later-life work to the benefit of both organizations and employees.

Original languageEnglish
JournalThe International Journal of Human Resource Management
Volume34
Issue number18
Pages (from-to)3520–3554
Number of pages35
ISSN0958-5192
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

    Research areas

  • Aging workforce, older employees’ health, person-environment fit, retirement timing
  • Business psychology

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Integrating a piezoelectric actuator with mechanical and hydraulic devices to control camless engines
  2. Tree species identity, canopy structure and prey availability differentially affect canopy spider diversity and trophic composition
  3. Modeling of microstructural pattern formation in crystal plasticity
  4. Special Issue: A variational pragmatic approach to regional variation in language: Celebrating the work of Klaus P. Schneider
  5. Managing information in the case of opinion spamming
  6. Leading Knowledge Exploration and Exploitation in Schools
  7. Random year intercepts in mixed models help to assess uncertainties in insect population trends
  8. A Study on the Impact of Intradomain Finetuning of Deep Language Models for Legal Named Entity Recognition in Portuguese
  9. Categorizing urban tasks
  10. From theory to experience
  11. Managing Multiple Logics: The Role of Performance Measurement Systems in Social Enterprises
  12. Dynamische Mathematik
  13. Performance of the Chemcatcher ® passive sampler when used to monitor 10 polar and semi-polar pesticides in 16 Central European streams, and comparison with two other sampling methods
  14. Functions of Constitutions
  15. Comparison of Panel Cointegration Tests
  16. External State-Building and Why Norms Matter
  17. rSOESGOPE Method Applied to Four-Tank System Modeling
  18. Do Linguistic Features Influence Item Difficulty in Physics Assessments?
  19. History of Embryology: Visualizations Through Series and Animation
  20. Responsibility and environment
  21. Using the learner-generated drawing strategy
  22. Development and characterisation of a new interface for coupling capillary LC with collision-cell ICPMS and its application for phosphorylation profiling of tryptic protein digests
  23. Clashing Values
  24. Stabilisierung durch Implementieren, Sichern und Evaluieren
  25. Choice and quantity demand for improved and unimproved public water sources in rural areas
  26. Negotiation complexity
  27. Learning-related emotions in multimedia learning