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Retirement involves a set of institutional arrangements combined with socio-cultural meanings to sustain a distinct retirement phase in life course and career pathways. In this Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Reinventing Retirement: New Pathways, New Arrangements, New Meanings,’ we outline the historical development of retirement. We identify the dramatic broad-based changes that recently have shaken this established construct to its core. We describe the main organizational responses to these changes, and how they have been associated with shifting, multiple meanings of retirement. Finally, we present a model that frames two general forms of reinvention of retirement. The first involves continuation of the idea of a distinct and well-defined period of life occurring at the end of a career trajectory, but with changes in the timing, the kinds of post-retirement activities pursued, and meanings associated with this period of life. The second represents a more fundamental reinvention in which the overall concept of retirement as a distinct period in an individual’s life is challenged or rejected, whether because it is not appealing or no longer realistic. We provide examples of how both types of reinvention may manifest in individuals’ careers and lives, and suggest future research directions that follow from our model.

This article considers the possibility that ‘high performance work system’ (HPWS) practices generate positive outcomes for employees by meeting their interests (specifically their interest in an orderly and predictable working environment). Utilising survey data on employees working in the Australian aged-care industry, statistical analysis is used to test the mediating effect of order and predictability on associations between HPWS practices and employee experience of work. The results suggest that positive outcomes arise in part because HPWS practices contribute to workplace order and predictability. In explaining this finding, the article highlights the importance of contextual factors, notably industry and employee characteristics, in shaping outcomes. The article concludes that socio-logically oriented analyses which apprehend the importance of employee interests provide a useful supplement to conventional psychologically oriented accounts of HPWS and provide a basis for continued development of labour process theory.

To address the increasing demand for mass undergraduate management education and, at the same time, a greater emphasis on student teamwork, this study outlines the development, delivery, and evaluation of a training intervention designed to build team-coaching skills in teaching assistants. Specifically, practice-centered and problem-centered techniques were used to provide teaching assistants with experiential learning opportunities to help them develop their skills. The authors evaluated the training intervention using a mixed-method multiple-data source design. Both the teaching assistants being trained as well as the student teams’ experiences and perceptions of their coaches’ performance were assessed. The evaluation showed that teaching assistants reported finding the program a positive experience. Importantly, students with trained coaches reported higher levels of coaching performance, team functioning, and productivity than those with untrained coaches. The implications of this intervention are discussed.

The effects of task and reward interdependence on perceived effort, helping behavior, and group performance were investigated in a laboratory setting. Fifty-seven groups with 3 undergraduate students in each group completed two consecutive copyediting activities. Helping behavior was highest in groups with high task interdependence. However, no support was found for the interactive effects of task and reward interdependence. Differences across time were found for perceived effort, helping behavior, and performance. The implications of these findings suggest that the increased task complexity, introduced through the presence of high levels of task interdependence, can mitigate the positive performance effects of high levels of helping behavior and effort.

Many organizations struggle with effective training interventions—in particular, the transfer of skills learned in the classroom to the workplace. The present experiential exercise allows students, who are asked to play the role of consultants, to assess training effectiveness from pretraining to posttraining. Student feedback demonstrates that this exercise provides a practical and realistic simulation that aids in the understanding of effective training interventions. This article presents the University Hospital exercise, its linkage to Goldstein's Instructional Systems Design framework, instructor notes, and questions for students. The exercise can be used for undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses.

This study examined the relation between racioethnic diversity and group efficacy (assessed as group outcome efficacy and group potency). Social cohesion was hypothesized to moderate this relationship. The authors also predicted that the interactive effect of racioethnic diversity and social cohesion on group efficacy would be mediated by task interdependence. The sample consisted of 42 student project groups. Data were gathered at the completion of the groups’ projects. The results indicate support for the hypotheses that racioethnic diversity is positively related to group efficacy and that the effect of racioethnic diversity on group outcome efficacy is enhanced by social cohesion. There was also some support for the mediating role of task interdependence.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to advance novel ways of thinking about retirement by developing new theoretical perspectives and harnessing methodologies that focus on the multiple meanings of retirement and distinctive behavioural pathways. We welcome conceptual and empirical papers that make clear contributions to this effort. These may include life course approaches, discursive or narrative methods, longitudinal assessments, or cross-cultural or generational perspectives, although they are not limited to these. We also strongly encourage works that are multidisciplinary in nature; for example, works that traverse gerontology and human resource management or demography and organizational behaviour.