What Can Motivate Me to Keep Working? Analysis of Older Finance Professionals’ Discourse Using Self-Determination Theory

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

- Our study expands on the literature addressing older employee 11 management by focusing on the financial sector, subject to enormous pressures. << Authors should specify the differences between older employees in the financial sector and others.
- monetary re-46 wards, benefits, career development, and work content and context << Do the summary of the research results cover these values?
- Since computers and technologies replace accounting and financial people sooner or later, authors should discuss this issue in their study as well. It could appear in the competence aspect of respondents too.
- We conducted this qualitative study in 2018 and interviewed 17 older finance professionals; 11 were still employed, and six had retired within the previous two years. We 130 selected them using the snowball technique (Creswell & Creswell, 2017) through advertisements on Facebook and LinkedIn. << Authors should give the reasons why these participants be a good representative for their study?
- Why snowball sampling technique is applied rather than purposive sampling?
- Why don't authors collect data from men and women equally?
- which practices meet their basic psychological needs and 152 foster the extension of their working lives? << Do all participants understand the basic psychological needs in the same senses? Do they clearly understand the SDT constructs' definitions?
- Authors should add all questions in the 3 Method section.
- In the parentheses, authors should add that whether are still working or retired.
- Authors should extract sub-issues related to each topic in bold fonts e.g., indicating what are factors influencing these topics or how the organization could make it happen (if any).
- How can authors summarize each topic based on only a few respondents? 
- Authors should match today's needs of accounting & financial workforces and the research results. Do older workers' competences are still matched with the need of organizations today?
- Authors should clearly show the different needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness between younger workers and older workers. Besides, they should clearly show the different needs between older workers in the financial sector and others.
- Authors should add the details about the size and other organization details about the companies that their respondents are working for.
- Authors should add a figure to summarize their research results.
- Authors should classify the positive factors and negative factors influencing older workers' SDT.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The abstract lacks a clearly defined objective. Literature review is based on very rich and current literature. The research was conducted among 17 financial professionals using interviews. The very small number of respondents makes the sample not representative, and the results of the study cannot be generalized either to the entire financial industry in the country or to other countries, nor can they be the basis for filling theoretical gaps. In the research, the Author(s) did not precisely define the research subject (financial professional). In the research part, when discussing the research results, no statistical methods have been used, not even structure indicators. There is a lack of clearly specified conclusions. The above considerations make me not recommend the article for publication. The topic is interesting and the research concept can be used to conduct broader research. 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for taking up an interesting topic of an analysis of older finance professionals' discourse using self-determination theory.

In general, the paper is valuable. However, it is necessary to introduce some changes aimed at increasing the quality in the area of ​​the presented content.

I encourage you to consider introducing the following modifications:

1) It is worth indicating the aim of the paper clearly (both in the abstract and in the introduction section).

2) The references in the text and at the end of the paper do not comply with the requirements of the journal.

3) In the introduction, the authors present contributions of the paper (lines 57-75). In my opinion, it is better to present contributions after the research results. Thus, I suggest moving this part to the end of the manuscript.

4) In the method part (line 132), the authors present the number of participants in the research sample using %. For small samples, it is not necessary to refer to%.

5) The structure of the research sample raises some doubts. It is very diverse. I am not entirely convinced that under "older finance professionals" we can refer to interviews with people aged 51 (respondent 1) and 65 (respondent 14).
The 51-year-old and the 65-year-old are at completely different stages of their professional careers. It is doubtful to treat them as a homogeneous group. Maybe this is worth referring to in the limitations section?

6) It is not common to add new references to conclusions (line 503). This part of the paper summarizes the results of the research and does not need to refer to other studies.

Regards,

The reviewer.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comment: Authors should clearly show the different needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness between younger workers and older workers. Besides, they should clearly show the different needs between older workers in the financial sector and others.
Answer: We recalled in the limitations part of our article that it was conducted only among older workers (which is often the case in studies with this population) likely to plan their retirement or be retired from a firm. We want to explore this population to answer our research question. As we did not interview young professionals, it is not possible to affirm and show that older professionals differ from young professionals in this or that aspect. We did not intend to demonstrate that. However, we added this limit in the interpretation of our results. Thank you for this comment.

For this comment, I suggest authors to compare and contrast their results with past studies.

Author Response

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The authors. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The changes made by the authors are at a satisfactory level. I recommend the article for publication. 

Author Response

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The authors. 

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Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,   Thanks for addressing my comments. I am pleased to recommend the paper for publishing.   Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!   Best regards, The reviewer

Author Response

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Thank you!

The authors. 

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