Career Crafting in the Post-retirement Work Engagements: Exploring the Crafting Behaviours of Post-Retired Employees in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Despite significant attention being paid to job crafting of individual employees, career crafting remains a relatively new area of focus, especially in understanding how older workers navigate their post-retirement work engagements. However, career crafting holds substantial potential for deepening our understanding of the post-retirement careers of retired employees. This paper aims to understand why and how retirees engage in career-crafting behaviours in their post-retirement work engagements. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study draws on focus group interviews with 23 retirees from four districts in Sri Lanka. Findings highlight that Retirees adopt cognitive, relational, and task crafting to redefine work, relationships, and activities, making post-retirement work purposeful, flexible, and identityenhancing while revealing the post-retirement career crafting among Sri Lankan retirees is shaped by motivations such as self-reinvention, autonomy, family bonding, and defying aging stereotypes, reflecting both personal agency and cultural values.