Applying the unfolding model of turnover and job embeddedness to the retirement decision process

By 2016, over 23% of the workforce is expected to be 55 and older (Toossi, 2007), within the timeframe in which they will consider leaving the workforce, to retire, thus creating a potential crisis for employers. This creates an urgent need to understand how employees decide when to retire. By understanding the retirement decision-making process, organizations can help to retain employees for a longer period of time while planning their workforce accordingly. In this dissertation, I present a model outlining the retirement decision process. This model contributes to the retirement literature on how retirees follow different paths in the decision-making process leading to retirement. This new model, based on the unfolding model of turnover (T. W. Lee & Mitchell, 1994) accounts for more contextual factors that have proved more difficult to assess in traditional retirement research and includes a newer construct, job embeddedness, which plays a role in the retirement decision-making process.