HR professionals' views on work motivation and retention of older workers

Abstract

This article addresses the particular risks and challenges that HR professionals are facing due to loss of the valuable knowledge that older workers possess before they retire and to identify demographic and work-related antecedents of the motives that influence the decision of older workers to remain in the workforce. The study adopts a qualitative approach, using focus groups in India. A total of 15 participants were purposefully selected from different organisational settings (e.g. private and public organisations, various sectors, various organisational sizes, HR departments and HR consultants) and from different areas of HR practice (e.g. recruitment, selection, training, evaluation, diversity management, industrial relations). Several procedures are applied to carry out a rigorous qualitative analysis (i.e. interview guide, video recording and field notes, prompt transcripts, double coding, direct quotes and rich data slices when presenting findings). The paper reveals that focus groups generate rich interaction and their content analysis results are the demographic variables (age, gender, marital status) predicted the financial motive for continuing to work whereas the work-related variables (work centrality, career satisfaction, and perceived contribution/perceived reward of owning one's own business) predicted the work fulfillment and generativity motives.