Valuable but Contractual: Architectural Misalignment in Post-Retirement Re-Employment and the Loss of Firm-Specific Knowledge

An organisation that reaches the statutory retirement age holding an employee it cannot readily replace will often re-engage that employee on a fixed-term contract. The reason given is continuity: the organisation wants to keep what the person knows. The employment mode it selects, however, is the one human resource architecture theory reserves for work that is neither strategically valuable nor firm-specific. It carries no development budget, no position in succession planning, no protected time, and no obligation to pass anything on. This paper argues that the arrangement constitutes architectural misalignment, a mismatch between the human capital characteristics that motivated the re-engagement and the commitment level of the mode through which it is delivered, and that the misalignment works against the organisation's own reason for re-engaging. Drawing on the human resource architecture, on bridge employment research, and on studies of knowledge loss at exit, we advance six propositions linking misalignment to a thinner knowledge-transfer opportunity structure and thence to reduced successor readiness. We identify contract purpose as an intervention that needs no new budget and no change of employment status, though it does reallocate contracted time from output to transfer, and we identify an institutional condition in the Malaysian setting that appears to make the misalignment the default rather than a managerial choice.

Keywords: post-retirement re-employment; human resource architecture; knowledge transfer; talent management; ageing workforce; fixed-term contracts; Malaysia

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