The Normative Anticipation of Retirement by Older Workers

Abstract

The scope of explanation for retirement behavior could be greatly enlarged by acknowledging workers' extended engagement with the question before the event-its "givenness" in their future, and their course of action toward it. This study provides evidence for such extended involvement among workers aged 51 to 61 in the 1992 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) who saw themselves being within 15 years of retiring. To the extent that workers foresaw less time left at work, they reported more frequent thinking and talking about retirement. This pattern was quite general. The consideration given to retirement was, as expected, more frequent in circumstances that might orient workers toward the future. However, even absent these circumstances, subjective proximity still predicted the topicality of retirement. Widely held, albeit individual, timetables for retirement demonstrate its embeddedness in the subjective life course of older workers.We suppose retirement to be a course of action. In this article, we demonstrate a basic feature of that course. Working people are engaged in the idea of retirement years in advance, and this engagement has a general and regular pattern. We have argued elsewhere that workers' decision making for retirement extends over a considerable period (Ekerdt 1998;Ekerdt, DeViney, and Kosloski 1996). The extended stream of decision making for retirement can be observed in the

Experienced Support from Adult Children in the Retirement Process

“…Retirement is a topic that many older workers talk about with their partner (Ekerdt, Kosloski, & DeViney, 2000) and partners have been clearly shown to influence retirement decision making (Henkens, 1999;Henkens & Van Solinge, 2002;Szinovacz & DeViney, 2000). Retirees without a partner (e.g., because of a divorce) are a vulnerable group in the retirement process.…”

Do Older Workers Develop a Short-Timer's Attitude Prior to Retirement? Evidence from a Panel Study

“…Also for workers who have passed their planned retirement age, relatively large increases in work disengagement were found. So, when approaching planned retirement older workers do not only perceive their job as more burdensome (Ekerdt & DeViney, 1993) and increase their frequency of thinking, talking and reading about retirement (Ekerdt et al, 2000;Evans et al, 1985), but also decrease their work investments, activities and motivation. Besides contributing to the preretirement process literature, these findings contribute to the career literature by showing that during late-careers specific forces (i.e., looming retirement) start to play a role that are of little importance during other career stages.…”

“…Third, even though the selected organizations are highly diverse in their branches of industry and the studied employees vary substantially on important variables like career experiences, work characteristics and health, the workers in the studied sample are not representative of all Dutch older workers. The selected organizations are all large organizations, in which career timetables are generally prominent and the topicality of retirement high (Ekerdt et al, 2000).…”

The Role of Line Managers in Retirement Management and Their Perceptions of Their Role of the Timing of Employee Retirement

“…First, the attitude-behaviour relationship is strongest when attitudes are more easily accessible (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1977;Glasman and Albarracín, 2006;Tversky and Kahneman, 1981). Late career psychological processes such as work disengagement and the development of a selfconcept independent from work (Damman et al, 2013;Greller and Simpson, 1999) are likely to correspond to an increase in the amount of time spent thinking, talking, and reading about retirement (Ekerdt et al, 2000;Evans et al, 1985). Second, the attitude-behaviour relationship is strengthened when the object of the attitude is personally and continuously relevant (Glasman and Albarracín, 2006).…”