Occupational self-efficacy and expectations for future job performance in older workers

The number of older workers is rapidly increasing and it is thus crucial to ensure their productivity as Western economies become increasingly reliant on this population. Given the powerful relationships between personal resources, self-efficacy, and performance and the increased need to determine ways to help older workers remain productive, the focus of my dissertation was to further understand the nature of the relationships between these factors. The overarching goal of this study was to concurrently examine the relative strength and importance of the factors predicting older workers\u27 confidence in their abilities and how this confidence was related to older adults\u27 occupational future in terms of retirement age and expectations for their continued performance. To my knowledge, these factors had not been investigated simultaneously in one model, so the present study sought to fill this research gap and further clarify the roles of these central predictors of occupational self-efficacy and its outcomes. The results demonstrated that personal resources (e.g., physical health), personal characteristics (e.g., self-esteem), workplace environment (e.g., job stressors), and functional limitations predicted occupational self-efficacy. In turn, occupational self-efficacy predicted job satisfaction and intrinsic job motivation mediated this relationship. Occupational self-efficacy also predicted older workers\u27 estimated future job performance. These results indicate that both individual and context factors predict older adults\u27 feelings of competence in regard to their jobs and that this in turn predicted both immediate and long-term job outcomes. These findings have implications for developing workplace interventions that seek to maintain or increase older worker productivity by focusing on occupational self-efficacy