Relational spirals and thriving: A longitudinal investigation of older workers

Abstract Thriving is believed to occur when employees feel a sense of progress and momentum in the organization. This conceptual basis for thriving is inherently temporal—implying an underlying individual change process—which sets thriving apart from other well‐being criteria in the Human Resource Management literature. However, surprisingly little research has demonstrated and unpacked the change and development processes that lead to thriving. In this article, we develop and test a theoretical model of the dynamic origins of thriving in a socially important context: the aging workforce. Specifically, we propose that older workers thrive when they experience relational spirals: a deepening of the employee‐organization relationship as psychological contracts and role expansion drive each other in a mutually reinforcing spiral. Results from a large‐scale nationally representative longitudinal study of 3370 Australian older workers—spanning 1.5 years and three time points—support the proposed model. Older workers' relational psychological contracts and role expansion formed a mutually reinforcing spiral process over time which ultimately led to higher levels of thriving. These results held even after imposing autoregressive control of lagged variables at earlier time points, and after accounting for the contributions of transactional psychological contracts to the spiral process. Our theorizing and empirical approach brings dynamic processes to the forefront of HR research on thriving, and points to implications for the role of HR in successful aging.