There is much being made in organizations of late about generational differences. This includes a lot of consulting, study, and work around Millennials and what organizations must do to entice and keep them as talent, and the “four-generation workforce” and how to simultaneously bind people from four generations to one organization. Books are being sold, trainings run, and strategy developed by the reams.
There’s just one problem: according to the empirical data, generational differences don’t seem to exist. Read Generationally Based Differences in the Workplace: Is There a There There? by Costanza and Finkelstein (Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Sept. 2015) for more. A summary:
[I]t is clear from generations research that
, although some studies claim that the underlying argument is that there are gradual changes over time, these arguments are obviated by other studies that claim distinct generational differences or state that the changes are gradual but then report their findings only in terms of the generational labels and stereotypes. Although this distinction may seem to be only a semantic difference (i.e., differences among generations vs. differences caused by generational membership), the limited empirical findings, the methodological limitations of the generations research, and the lack of clear boundaries for generations (see Costanza et al., 2012, for a chart depicting the variance in generation start and end dates) all point to the phenomenon being more myth than reality.
This is a topic of conversation and several meetings at my company. This was a great read and changed my mind on how to deal with new hires.
Glad to hear you liked it. We see a lot of activity around this topic and a lot of it seems awfully speculative. Seems the data agree.