Healthy Ageing and Well-Being at Work

Abstract

Achieving healthy ageing and well-being at work has become an issue of growing importance, particularly with recent changes in retirement legislation in Europe and beyond. Some of these changes include the abolition of mandatory retirement age in the UK and increased retirement ages in other European Union (EU) countries—in most cases, from 65 to 67 years of age in countries such as Germany, France, Spain and Denmark (Peiró et al. 2012). Research to date has not yet provided unequivocal support regarding how ageing affects employee well-being. Whereas some studies have observed positive effects, others have reported negative age effects on employee well-being (e.g., Alkjaer et al. 2005; Sui et al. 2001). Regarding occupational well-being, in particular, most of the research has supported a U-shaped relationship between age and well-being in the workplace with younger and older employees showing the highest levels of occupational well-being (e.g., Zacher et al. 2014). The existing evidence therefore seems to suggest that age may not necessarily have an adverse impact on health and well-being at work, but much more research is needed to understand this relationship. This chapter addresses the issue of healthy ageing at work by first integrating the existing evidence around the age effects on psychological and subjective well-being among older employees and then analysing different underlying mechanisms and protective factors implicated in the age–well-being relationship in order to shed more light on how healthy ageing at work can be achieved. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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