The Transition to Retirement
Description
My current major research program is the Retirement Transitions Study: a broad study of retiring professionals' everyday experiences, including identification with work; identity stability, change, and development; meaningfulness of work; changes in life structure, key relationships, and involvement in creative activity; and the role that these experiences (as well as other factors) play in attitudes toward and experiences during retirement. The purpose is to discover how people think and feel about their work experiences across the lifespan, how they make the decision to retire, what forms the transition process takes, how people and their lives change during the process, and what influences successful adjustment to retirement. Our data collection uses multiple methods, including surveys, daily diaries, and extensive semi-structured interviews. We have collected data from current and retired employees in three companies, in four broad groups: (a) employees in the first 5-10 years of their careers; (b) employees in the last 5-10 years of their careers; (c) employees with a planned retirement date in the coming 12 months (interviewed several times as they approached and moved through the retirement transition, and settled into retirement life); and (d) retirees of those companies, who retired in the previous few years. Our research team endeavors to contribute new insights that will be valuable to scholars, organizational leaders, and individual employees as they move through and past their careers. The research team includes Lotte Bailyn (MIT Sloan), Kathy Kram and Tim Hall (BU Questrom School of Management), Marcy Crary (Bentley University), Jeff Steiner (Harvard Business School doctoral candidate), and Debra Rowcroft (Harvard Business School research associate). To date, we have produced two papers based on this work: a Guidepost Commentary on the importance of qualitative research on retirement, published in the journal Work, Aging, and Retirement (2019), and a paper on our methodology (Amabile & Hall), (2019) in Academy of Management Perspectives.