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The Psychological Contracts of Older Employees

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Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship

Abstract

Many organizations are currently facing an aging workforce and have therefore called for researchers to examine how older employees can be optimally motivated and retained. To this end, we believe it is essential to understand what older employees expect from their organization. We therefore introduce the psychological contract—describing the mutual obligations between employee and employer—and review the literature on older employees’ psychological contracts. In addition, we perform a meta-analysis to shed additional light on the type of obligations that older employees perceive in their psychological contract. We conclude that future studies should focus on unraveling the mechanisms—such as future time perspective and changing goals and values—that create differences between older and younger employees in the content of and the reactions to the psychological contract. Practitioners are advised to monitor changes in these underlying mechanisms as employees grow older, and to implement age-conscious Human Resource policies accordingly in order to manage older employees’ psychological contracts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We follow the majority of the literature and consider employees who are older than 50 as “older employees” (Bal et al., 2008; Kanfer et al., 2013; Kooij et al., 2008).

  2. 2.

    The mother tongue of the authors.

  3. 3.

    References marked with an asterisk indicate studies included in the meta-analysis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Tim Vantilborgh

  2. Department of Organisation Studies, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Nicky Dries

  3. Antwerp Management School, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Ans de Vos

  4. School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, UK

    P. Matthijs Bal

Authors
  1. Tim Vantilborgh
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  2. Nicky Dries
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  3. Ans de Vos
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  4. P. Matthijs Bal
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Correspondence to Tim Vantilborgh .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom

    P. Matthijs Bal

  2. Department of Human Resource Studies, University of Tilburg, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Dorien T.A.M. Kooij

  3. H. John Heinz III College, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Denise M. Rousseau

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Vantilborgh, T., Dries, N., de Vos, A., Bal, P.M. (2015). The Psychological Contracts of Older Employees. In: Bal, P., Kooij, D., Rousseau, D. (eds) Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08007-9_7

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