Retirement Adjustment Quality: Optimism and Self-Efficacy as Antecedents of Resource Accumulation

The resource-based dynamic perspective posits that retirement adjustment quality is a direct result of an individual’s access to valuable resources during transition and in the post-retirement phase, while at the same time underscoring the need to explore the distal antecedents of adjustment quality. The present study aims to examine how distal antecedents—dispositional traits and motivational variables—influence older workers’ resource accumulation and, ultimately, how it affects retirement adjustment quality, under the resource-based dynamic perspective and Hobfoll’s resource theory. A three-wave study was designed with older Spanish workers (N = 455), who were still in active employment at time 1 and time 2 but who had retired within the last 4 months at time 3. Dispositional traits like optimism have predictive power as a gauge of resource accumulation in the short run, although not all of them were fully significant. Some unexpected findings are the limited impact of personal finances on retirement adjustment quality and the absolutely nugatory influence of cognitive resources on quality of life. The present study employs a widely validated measure of retirement adjustment quality, which should ensure comparability of findings with evidence obtained from other studies.