Date of Award
5-2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Industrial-Organizational Psychology
Committee Member
Dr. Mary Anne Taylor, Committee Chair
Committee Member
Dr. Patrick Rosopa
Committee Member
Dr. Fred Switzer
Committee Member
Dr. Thomas Zagenczyk
Abstract
The aging workplace is becoming a focus for organizations around the United States, as the Baby Boomer generation is rapidly approaching retirement. This is concerning due to the talent that will be lost and demographic and educational shifts suggesting that organizations will be challenged to replace this talent. There are, however, options for retired workers that may serve to be beneficial for both the organization and retiree. An option growing in popularity is bridge employment, where retired individuals engage in work post-retirement. Organizations can use this trend of bridge employment to their advantage by determining which factors influence retirees to engage in mentoring, since this allows retirees to transfer their knowledge to a new group of workers. Firms may also benefit by predicting who in their organization will be most likely to come back to work for them. The present study sought to learn more about the relationships of organizational, work-related, and personality oriented variables to interest in mentoring among retirees, more specifically organizational commitment, job involvement and generativity. 220 retired, formally white-collar individuals were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and took a survey assessing their degree of affective organizational commitment and job involvement towards their former job, along with their level of generativity and willingness to mentor at their former place of employment in a similar occupation or a different place of employment in a similar occupation. Results indicated that the willingness to mentor is influenced by generativity for all participants and the interactions between affective commitment and generativity and job involvement and generativity for participants over the age of 60. Results also showed significant main effects of organizational preference, affective commitment, and job involvement on willingness to mentor in participants over the age of 60. The results of this study will advance the area of bridge employment and mentoring research and provide valuable information to organizations who hope to retain older workers passed retirement age and recruit retirees to help bridge knowledge and skill gaps.
Recommended Citation
Pelkey, Miranda Marie, "Relationship of Organizational Commitment, Job Involvement, and Generativity to Interest in Mentoring Among Retirees" (2017). All Dissertations. 1930.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/1930