Exploring post-retirement role identity emergence in public company CEOs

Abstract

Retirement is widely conceptualised as both a life status and a dynamic process that occurs over an extended period of time, as individuals prepare for, experience and adapt to postretirement life. Extensive study and a growing body of empirical research have illuminated the antecedents, experiences and outcomes of the retirement transition from various perspectives. Despite these efforts, a deep understanding of the retirement transition process is lacking. This study responds to recent calls for qualitative researchers to advance retirement theory by linking career trajectories to retirement choices and by obtaining a deeper understanding of identity stability and change across the retirement transition. It does so by employing the idiographic focus of interpretative phenomenological analysis and abductive reasoning in its research design in order to explore the retirement process of the public company CEO (Chief Executive Officer), an under-researched retiree-type whose work role salience and resources amplify retirement transition discontinuities relative to other retirees. These characteristics create novel questions on how individuals choose to achieve meaning in retirement. The research findings established respondent’s pre-retirement role identities and preparation as a baseline for the phenomenon of role identity emergence in retirement. The data revealed linkages between interrelated, contiguous, recursive phenomena and processes during a phase of liminality and emergence. Respondents’ epiphanies and role identity cues were found to precipitate a contemporaneous evaluation of the resources available to address them, giving rise to sensemaking, identity enactment and identity narrative construction. The function of often non-conscious underlying identity motives in guiding these cognitions and processes is emphasised, leading to a novel theory on how the realignment, reinterpretation, reprioritisation, discovery or replacement of identity motives mitigates the stress of threats to the identity standard. It does so with due regard to the merits and risks of self-relevant research. The first quarter of the 21st century in the west is experiencing an era of increasing longevity and more active lifestyles after retirement. The findings of this research aim to provide policymakers, society, organisations, families and individuals with new perspectives on the retirement transition.