Pre-retirement work disengagement? Examining associations of job and leisure satisfaction with life satisfaction prior to retirement

Georg Henning (German Centre for Gerontology)

A satisfying job is important for workers across their work lifespan. However, before workers retire, it is often assumed that they start to become less attached to their workplace and focus on other life areas instead. This supposed disengagement process, however, is not well understood. To date, few studies have examined whether the importance that an individual attaches to their job changes as they approach retirement. Likewise, it is not known which life areas become more important in anticipation of retirement. In the present study, we used longitudinal data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (n = 2,866) to investigate if the within-person associations between job and life satisfaction and between leisure and life satisfaction change in the ten years preceding retirement. We found that in this sample, job satisfaction was positively associated with life satisfaction at the between- and within-person level, but the within-person association weakened as workers approached retirement. The within-person association between leisure and life satisfaction was also positive across time, but did not change significantly on the lead up to retirement. We discuss these findings in the context of work disengagement and self-regulation theories and highlight the importance of taking the very last years of the work life into account when studying older workers or retirement adjustment.

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