Donald M. Truxillo

Background: Early retirements and decreasing job retention rates have resulted in a growing shortage of nursing staff in the healthcare systems of many countries. Recently, the World Health Organization and the European Commission have joined forces to attract and retain nurses in their systems in a period of increasing demand for healthcare services, due to population aging. While recruiting and training new nurses is a necessary long-term solution, it is equally important for policymakers to focus on retaining the current workforce, as to ensure continuity of care. Aim: This paper aims to review current literature and to discuss the key aspects of this critical issue, focusing on the concept of healthy aging and its significance as a key strategy for retaining nursing staff. Design: This discursive paper explores published literature highlighting the interaction between aging and the challenges that nursing staff faces in daily practice. It also examines global trends in retirement patterns and proposes strategies to retain the aging workforce, with a particular focus on succession planning and knowledge transfer. Results-Conclusion: Both general and more targeted approaches that have been proposed are necessary to enhance nursing staff retention. These approaches include the concept of promoting healthy aging, which can play a key role in this regard. Implications: This paper addresses the nursing staff shortage, highlighting strategies that have been proposed as to prioritize staff retention for healthcare providers and personnel managers.

Many aspects of one’s life are uncertain due to missing information about situations, probabilistic events, and decision outcomes. In this article, we argue and show that diverse perspectives from lifespan development as well as work and organizational psychology can be integrated into a fuller picture of individuals’ experiences of work-related transitions over the life course through the lens of uncertainty. Drawing from a panel discussion among several of the authors and the literature in aging, career, work, and retirement research, we develop an integrative conceptual framework that differentiates between exogenous and endogenous sources of uncertainty and highlights macro-, meso-, and micro-level sources of individuals’ experience of uncertainty as they navigate work-related transitions. Moreover, we discuss sources of uncertainty in perceptions, evaluations, and decisions during work-related transitions. Based on our framework, we propose a roadmap with recommendations for future research, which include (1) the conceptualization and operationalization of uncertainty based on perspectives common in aging, career, work, and retirement research, (2) the understanding of why and when aspects of uncertainty in work-related transitions can be challenges yet also provide new opportunities, and (3) organizational and policy measures that can help individuals successfully manage these uncertainties over the life course.

Organizational socialization and the practice of onboarding new hires are central human resources functions. However, traditional socialization theory and practice were built on assumptions that are increasingly misaligned with today's work context. We identified four current, emerging, and future work trends that characterize the evolving landscape surrounding organizational socialization: technological advancement, the expansion of remote work arrangements, rising societal loneliness and mental health challenges, and aging workforce demographics. Collectively, these trends have contributed to dramatic shifts in the context and performance of work, as well as the expectations that employees and organizations hold for one another. Accordingly, we argue that these shifts require a renewed examination of the organizational socialization process that reflects contemporary realities such as the move away from stable, physically co‐located, psychologically anchored work toward boundaryless, tech‐mediated, and transient work arrangements. Our review presents a future‐forward look at organizational socialization through the lens of these societal and workplace shifts. We identify newcomer adaptability and connection as emergent critical factors for the future of onboarding. Through this lens, we offer practical implications for human resource practice and invite future research that advances our understanding of organizational socialization in today's context.

The effective socialization of newcomers into organizations is critical for employee and organizational success. As such, ensuring successful onboarding has become even more pivotal for newcomer adjustment, performance, and retention. The literature has seen significant growth and incorporated new theoretical perspectives, such as resource-based approaches since the most recent comprehensive meta-analytic review of the literature. Therefore, we extended earlier reviews by presenting an updated model of the socialization process, reviewing the literature, and examining this updated model via meta-analysis. In all, we identified 256 studies that met our meta-analytic inclusion criteria, and 183 with sufficient k across construct categories were included in our meta-analysis. At the correlational level, we analyzed antecedents to proximal adjustment indicators and proximal adjustment to distal outcomes. We examined a potential moderator, whether the study took place in a horizontal-individualistic (HI) versus vertical-collectivistic (VC) culture. Last, we analyzed a path model to identify unique relationships between specific antecedents (age, full-time work experience, organizational tenure, proactive personality, information seeking, organizational tactics, insider mentoring/supporting), proximal adjustment indicators (social acceptance, role clarity, task mastery, perceived fit), and distal outcomes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intentions, other-rated performance, and well-being). Our analyses uncover the role of proactive personality and proactive newcomer behaviors in newcomer adjustment and the importance of social acceptance for newcomers. They also identify perceptions of fit as an important but relatively under-examined adjustment indicator and newcomer well-being as an additional socialization outcome. We develop future directions for socialization theory and research methods.

Job interviews involve an exchange of information between interviewers and applicants to assess fit from each side. But current frameworks on interviewers' job previews and applicants' self‐presentation do not completely capture these exchange processes. Using a grounded theory approach, we developed a theoretical model that spans both literatures by showing the complex relationships between job previews and self‐presentation in the interview. Our study also introduces a new way of categorizing applicant self‐presentation and reveals why interviewers and applicants choose to use certain strategies. Based on 43 qualitative interviews with applicants and interviewers, we identified five dominant applicant self‐presentation responses to job preview information: Receding from the Application Process, Reciprocating Reality, Exploiting the RJP, Resisting in Defiance, and Reciprocating Illusion. Furthermore, we found that applicants present many versions of themselves that not only include their actual, favorable, and ought self but also their anticipated‐future self. We also identify interviewers' and applicants' conflicting motives for presenting reality and illusion. Our work provides a deeper understanding of job previews and self‐presentation by providing a big‐picture, yet fine‐grained examination of the communication processes from the viewpoint of the applicant and the interviewer, illustrating implications for both parties and proposing new avenues for research.

Research on the concept of existing unidimensional Perceived Work Ability scale (PWA) in organizational science has recently increased due to its prediction of important work, individual, and labor force outcomes. To date, PWA has been measured as a unidimensional construct. The present study outlines the need for the multidimensional conceptualization of PWA and its measurement. We describe the development and validation of the Multidimensional Perceived Work Ability Scale (M-PWAS), comprising four dimensions: physical, cognitive, interpersonal, and emotional. In line with Hinkin's (1998) approach to scale validation, we use four samples (total N = 1,152) to establish the M-PWAS as a reliable and valid measure of PWA. Through an iterative item generation and review process, we found evidence for content validity. Furthermore, each subscale demonstrated high internal consistency and factorial validity, and analysis of the PWA nomological network demonstrated evidence for convergent and discriminant validity. Finally, we found that the M-PWAS showed incremental validity over an existing unidimensional PWA measure in the prediction of perceived stress, emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and turnover. We discuss implications for theory, research, and workplace interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

As populations in the United States and around the world continue to age, it has become increasingly important to understand how organizations can create working conditions that attract, support, and retain workers across the lifespan. In this paper, we provide a primer on current theory and research on age in the workplace. We briefly describe lifespan theories that have guided recent advances in the field, discuss the implications of these theories for an aging workforce, and provide an overview of current research streams that address the work and nonwork factors affecting performance, well‐being, and workforce participation among mature workers. Based on this review, we provide recommendations for future research and practice.

Can employers use realistic job previews to encourage applicants to open up in job interviews? We draw on theories of self‐disclosure to examine the association between realistic job previews and applicants' willingness to self‐disclose and use image protection tactics. We also examine perceived competition for the job and Honesty‐Humility as moderators. Results of a between‐subjects 2 × 2 experimental study (N = 396) show that realistic job previews were associated with decreased willingness in applicants to self‐disclose during the interview. This effect was stronger when applicants perceived high competition for the job. Organizational attractiveness and trust toward the employer mediated the effect. There were no direct effects of realistic job previews on image protection tactics. Furthermore, willingness to self‐disclose and use image protection tactics was influenced by applicants' Honesty‐Humility, but Honesty‐Humility did not moderate the relation between job preview condition and willingness to self‐disclose and use image protection tactics.

Job crafting has often been conceptualized as a higher-order construct composed of 3 dimensions: seeking resources, seeking challenges, and reducing demands. However, recent advances in job crafting studies have questioned the composition of its multidimensional structure. Furthermore, job crafting has been widely studied in age-diverse samples of workers, but not properly studied among older workers. In this article, we investigate the multidimensional structure of job crafting in 2 samples of older workers with a managerial role. In Study 1, in a cross-sectional sample (1,020 school superintendents, M_age = 57.27, SD_age = 5.15) using a series of competing factorial analytic models (CFA, ESEM, bifactor-CFA, bifactor-ESEM), we demonstrated that reducing demands did not show significant relationships with the other 2 dimensions (at both the item and latent levels). In Study 2, a longitudinal study (350 school superintendents, M_age = 56.54, SD_age = 5.11, Wave = 2, lag = 10 months), we further supported the structural results obtained in Study 1; furthermore, using a factorial cross-lagged panel model with 2 widely-accepted correlated constructs of job crafting (i.e., work engagement and emotional exhaustion), we again supported the independent nature of the reducing demands dimension, and we also showed the importance of seeking challenges. Indeed, the latter was a significant longitudinal predictor of work engagement, while all the other cross-lagged relationships were nonsignificant. Overall, our studies pose new questions about the structure of job crafting in older-worker populations.

Employers have increasingly turned to virtual interviews to facilitate online, socially distanced selection processes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is little understanding about the experience of job candidates in these virtual interview contexts. We draw from Event System Theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) to advance and test a conceptual model that focuses on a high-stress, high-stakes setting and integrates literatures on workplace stress with literatures on applicant reactions. We predict that when applicants ruminate about COVID-19 during an interview and have higher levels of COVID-19 exhaustion, they will have higher levels of anxiety during virtual interviews, which in turn relates to reduced interview performance, lower perceptions of fairness, and reduced intentions to recommend the organization. Further, we predict that three factors capturing COVID-19 as an enduring and impactful event (COVID-19 duration, COVID-19 cases, COVID-19 deaths) will be positively related to COVID-19 exhaustion. We tested our propositions with 8,343 job applicants across 373 companies and 93 countries/regions. Consistent with predictions, we found a positive relationship between COVID-19 rumination and interview anxiety, and this relationship was stronger for applicants who experienced higher (vs. lower) levels of COVID-19 exhaustion. In turn, interview anxiety was negatively related to interview performance, fairness perceptions, and recommendation intentions. Moreover, using a relevant subset of the data (n = 6,136), we found that COVID-19 duration and deaths were positively related to COVID-19 exhaustion. This research offers several insights for understanding the virtual interview experience embedded in the pandemic and advances the literature on applicant reactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).