Exploring the experiences of pre-retirement organisational strategies within the South African tyre manufacturing industry

Abstract

This study focused on exploring the visions, perceptions, work-related challenges, concerns and critical aspects of the pre-retirement planning, followed by exploring the available and proposed organisational strategies for adequate preparation and optimisation of pre-retirement employees in the South African tyre manufacturing industry. The overall objective of the study was to explore the experiences of pre-retirement organisational strategies within the South African tyre manufacturing industry according to the perspective of pre-retirees in the organisation. This study consists of two articles: Article 1: Exploring the experiences of pre-retirement employees in the South African tyre manufacturing industry. The findings of article 1 showed that the participants experienced both negative and positive feelings towards their future retirement. Various work-related challenges and concerns were reported and the participants indicated that they felt anxious about whether they were adequately prepared for retirement. Article 2: Exploring organisational strategies for pre-retirement planning in the South African tyre manufacturing industry. The findings for this article revealed that the participants indicated that the organisation provided minimal and insufficient pre-retirement initiatives and/or programmes. Recommendations for suitable and needed initiatives were provided by the participants. A qualitative research design with a qualitative descriptive research strategy was followed to reach the objectives of the study. The interpretivist paradigm was further utilised to implement this research study. A combination of non-probability purposive and convenience sampling techniques was applied. Twenty-six (N=26) participants drawn from a tyre manufacturing company voluntarily participated in the research for both articles 1 and 2. Data collection was performed through semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis was used to analyse the data of both research articles.