Predictors of planned retirement age: an application of Beehr's model.

Given the aging workforce, understanding the retirement process is an area of increasing interest to organizations. T. A. Beehr's (1986) model of retirement behavior was used in this study as a basis for selecting personal, psychological, and organizational predictors of subsequent planned retirement age. In addition, potential differences in predictors of the planned retirement age of retirement-eligible and retirement-ineligible respondents were explored. Two hundred sixty-four respondents working for a large multinational firm completed 2 surveys on their attitudes toward work and retirement. Results showed that chronological age, employee health, and self-perceptions of the ability to adjust to retirement predicted subsequent planned retirement age. Interactions of the predictors with retirement eligibility are reported along with implications for retirement-planning programs.

Commitment and employee behavior: comparison of affective commitment and continuance commitment with perceived organizational support.

The social exchange view of commitment (R. Eisenberger, R. Huntington, S. Hutchison, & D. Sowa, 1986) suggests that employees' perceptions of the organization's commitment to them (perceived organizational support, or POS) creates feelings of obligation to the employer, which enhances employees' work behavior. The authors addressed the question of whether POS or the more traditional commitment concepts of affective commitment (AC) and continuance commitment (CC) were better predictors of employee behavior (organizational citizenship and impression management). Participants were 383 employees and their managers. Although results showed that both AC and POS were positively related to organizational citizenship and that CC was negatively related to organizational citizenship, POS was the best predictor. These findings support the social exchange view that POS creates feelings of obligation that contribute to citizenship behaviors. In addition, CC was unrelated, whereas AC and POS were positively correlated, with some impression management behaviors.

Self- and supervisory perspectives on age and work attitudes and performance.

Person- and context-oriented definitions of age were used to predict three sets of work outcomes: work attitudes, performance ratings, and reports of developmental practices. The five age measures included employee chronological age, employee subjective age (i.e., self-perceptions of age), and social age (i.e., others' perceptions of age), as well as self- and supervisors' perceptions of the employee's relative age (i.e., compared with the employee's work group). The study assessed (a) the relationships among the age measures, (b) the additive relationships among the age measures that predicted work outcomes, and (c) the interactive relationships among the age measures that predicted work outcomes. Each prediction received some support except for (b). Furthermore, many of the age--work-outcome relationships were replicated in the managerial sample. Implications for the use of alternative age measures are discussed.