How Do Development HR Practices Contribute to Employees’ Motivation to Continue Working Beyond Retirement Age?

This study tested a mediated model explaining 2 mechanisms through which perceived availability of developmental human resource (HR) practices are related to employee’s motivation to continue working beyond early retirement. On the one hand, development HR relates to more perceptions of a positive development climate, and on the other hand, development HR fulfills the individual needs of workers to build a positive psychological contract with their organization. It was expected that development HR would be positively related to older employees’ motivation to continue working. We further expected that these relationships would be mediated through perceptions of development climate, psychological contract fulfillment, organizational commitment, and work engagement. Hypotheses were tested using two samples (N = 313 and N = 352) of employees working in health care organizations in the Netherlands, and largely supported the hypotheses, finding significant indirect effects of development HR to motivation to continue working. The results of this study demonstrate not only that development HR may be important for older workers to be motivated to continue working, but also show how these relationships manifest.