2135: Relational Spirals and Thriving: a Longitudinal Investigation of Older Workers (12701)

Thriving is believed to occur when employees experience 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 HRM literature. However, limited research has explored the development process leading to thriving. This paper develops and tests a theoretical model on 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 3,370 Australian older workers—spanning 1.5 years and three time points—support the proposed model. Older workers’ relational psychological contracts and role expansion form a mutually reinforcing spiral process over time, leading to higher levels of thriving. These results held even after imposing autoregressive control of lagged variables at earlier time points, and after accounting for transactional psychological contracts. Our theorizing and empirical approach brings dynamic processes to the forefront of HR research on thriving and point to implications for the role of HR in successful aging.

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