Research project Extending working lives
The overall purpose of this project is to contribute to an increased understanding of individuals' retirement decision making and to investigate employers' perspectives on extended working lives and HR policies and strategies for an ageing workforce in the welfare sector.
This project is now closed. Read more about the results under the More about this project heading.
Extended working lives and active aging are central issues in most countries today, including Sweden, as a consequence of population ageing, increasing labor shortages in key sectors and changes in the pension systems. Nothwithstanding an increasing body of research on retirement, knowledge about the relative importance of various job and organizational factors for individuals' retirement decisions is still limited.
The project’s central questions are the following:
- How do older employees feel about their work?
- What thoughts do older employees have about aging and retirement?
- What drives people to want to extend their working lives?
- Which employees have a higher risk of a premature exit from working life?
- How do retirees experience work after retirement?
A special focus is placed on the role of psychosocial work environment, career-related and organizational factors to individuals’ retirement preferences, planning and decisions. The project will also examine employers’ (i.e., HR managers and first-line managers) attitudes and strategies for an increasingly older workforce within welfare.
The project's full title is: Extending working lives: Factors involved in older workers’ willingness and possibility to stay in the workforce and employers’ attitudes towards older people’s labor market participation.
Project members
Project managers
Marta Sousa-Ribeiro Larsson
Guest
Members
Claudia Bernhard-Oettel
Professor
Petra Lindfors
Professor
Magnus Sverke
Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology
More about this project
“Extended working lives” is a central topic in most countries, as a consequence of population ageing and increasing labor shortages. The overall purpose of this project was to contribute to the understanding of individuals' retirement decision making and employers' practices towards extended working lives. A special focus was placed on the role of psychosocial work environment, career-related and organizational factors for individuals’ retirement preferences, planning and decisions.
The project used various datasets: (1) the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH) (pre-existing data), (2) in-depth interviews with older nursing staff in eldercare and healthcare, (3) in-depth interviews with HR and first-line managers in eldercare, and (4) panel data collected with an on-line questionnaire at two time points, among a large sample of workers aged 56–65 years. A total of nine articles and four master theses have been produced within the project. Some of the data collected will be used in future studies.
In brief, quantitative findings show a general preference for early retirement, and that a significant proportion of individuals preferred to retire earlier than they expected to and actually did. Longitudinal analyses show that, while preferences to retire around the age of 65 and later remained relatively stable over six years, those who preferred retiring considerably earlier than 65, tended to adjust their preferences to a certain extent over time, however well below the age of 65. Overall, better health and work ability, lower effort-reward imbalance at work, an age-friendly work environment and feeling positive regarding the future at work, contributed to preferring, expecting and actually retiring at later ages. Furthermore, higher levels of emotional exhaustion, perceiving age-related inequalities at the workplace and perceiving aging as a future obstacle at work, contributed to preferring to retire earlier than one expected to. Findings also show that older workers’ work engagement and the willingness to prolong their working lives was encouraged by favorable psychosocial working conditions (e.g., low job demands and high job resources) combined with high levels of personal resources.
The qualitative studies add fine-grained analyses and insights regarding how eldercare nursing assistants, intensive care nurses and retired psychiatric ward nursing assistants involved in post-retirement work made sense of their experiences of work, as well as their late-career decisions when approaching retirement. The flexibility of the Swedish pension system and the openness of the organization to employ retired people were considered important to post-retirement work. Hourly-paid work was considered attractive, as it allowed for flexibility in working time and more control over the tasks to be performed, and facilitated a smoother transition to life as a retiree. Meaningful work was an important dimension in the positive experience of working, with the most prominent aspect being a sense of purpose and contribution to a larger good. Retirement planning was strongly influenced by considerations regarding one’s health, work ability, psychosocial work environment, and organizational practices that facilitated aging-in-workplace. A study with HR- and first-line managers in eldercare found however that, notwithstanding older employees being considered a valuable resource, the implementation of individual-tailored and age-specific management practices was perceived as challenging.
The project’s findings suggest that increasing statutory retirement ages and economic benefits for late retirement are far from enough in facilitating and encouraging older workers to postpone the full-exit from the workforce. Rather, the findings show the importance of adequate working conditions, an age-friendly workplace and human resources practices that enable a healthy and sustainable working life throughout the life-span.