ABSTRACT
Bridge employment is a labour force participation pattern increasingly observed in older workers. The present study applied the theory of planned behaviour and the principle of compatibility to predict two types of bridge employment decisions: career-based bridge employment and organization-based bridge employment. The study did this by examining the joint effect of work-related commitment variables and retirees’ economic stress. Lagged data were collected from 164 Chinese retirees. Results of logistic regression analysis showed that career commitment and organizational commitment (i.e., affective and continuance commitment to the organization) had positive main effects in predicting career-based and organization-based bridge employment decisions respectively, supporting the principle of compatibility. In addition, these predictive effects were moderated by economic stress as a contextual constraint. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications for the bridge employment decision-making literature.
