Successful Aging at Work: The Active Role of Employees

Since workforces are aging, governments, organizations, and researchers are increasingly interested in the topic of successful aging at work. In this article, I viewed successful aging at work from a sustainability perspective, and argued that a continuous person-job fit between the changing person and changing work is required for employees to be able to maintain their health, motivation, and work ability, and thus age successfully at work. Since one important way to achieve current and future fit is by engaging in proactive behaviors, I aimed to extend and specify the proactive behaviors proposed in lifespan psychology literature (e.g., selection) with proactive behaviors proposed in organizational psychology literature (e.g., job change negotiation) to identify proactive behaviors for successful aging at work. For example, job crafting can help aging workers to adjust their job to changing goals and motives, improving current person-job fit, and proactive career planning can help aging workers to set new career goals, improving future person-job fit.