Generational Gap and the Workplace Overview.

Article Citation

Macky, K., Gardner, D., & Forsyth, S. Generational differences at work: introduction and overview. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 23, 857-861.

Research Questions

            The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the vast opinions and information on the generation gap in the workplace. It is an introduction to the larger works of this guest editorial however it does a good job of explaining the background in the subject. This paper is claiming that there is a noticeable difference in the attitudes of different generations that has been studied for many years.

Theoretical or Conceptual Framework

            This article uses grounding by citing studies done on the topic of generation gaps. It cites many different studies that the journal later includes, some of them being for the idea of the generation gap, and some of them being against it. Most of the articles he cites are fairly recent at the time, the oldest one being from 1985. He even includes a quote from an article published in the same year. In my opinion, the majority of this article is based on the ideas of others making it a highly reliable article. It even offers counterarguments to its main claim.

            The hypothesis of this paper is that there is a difference between generations based on what the people of that generation have experienced and encountered.

Methods

            This article is based almost completely on the works of others, since it is introducing them. The advantage to this is that they have basically done the work for you and it all seems very legitimate. However, the issue with this type of article is that they are restrained to what other studies found. There are points when the author of this article seems to come through (e.g. when he discusses the root cause of generational differences) but for the most part the author of this article has very little input on the outcome of it.

Jurkiewicz: finding differences contrary to popular belief

        Setting: 5 municipalities in Mid-west metropolitan area, city manager formally requested employee envolvement

        Participants: 241 employees in public works, fire, police, and administration

        Procedures: Rank 15 factors in terms of what they wanted from their jobs

        Analysis: only 3 of the 15 factors were found to be significantly different between the baby boomers and Gen Xs. They found that 2 of these factors were actually opposite of their hypothesis.

        Limitations: small sampling area and small number of participants, only 2 generations included. These limit the scope of the study making it difficult to apply large scale.

Kupperschmidt, B.R.:

        This article is not a study but a narrative explaining the different generations and how managers should react to issues in the workplace between different generations. This article also lays out the stereotypes of generations and how that might affect them at work. This is a helpful article Macky to use because it is somewhat recent (2000) but holds most of the basic information needed to explain the possible differences between generations.

Twenge: researching generational differences over time.

        This article also used other studies as its basis for data, each of which it goes through completely in the article. They do find differences between generations and explain how that could change workplace behavior. The limitations as described in this article are that all of the studies done included self-reported data.

Unfortunately I do not have access to the other studies that this paper references so I cannot do this analysis for all of them.

Findings

            This article found that there is “evidence” of different personality types over different generations that are most likely caused by the events in each generations’ life which could lead to issues in the workplace.

            As this article is an introduction of many other articles I would like to use the way it describes those articles as the “related works.” It is obvious that the author of this article chose those studies to support his claim and to try to defend it. There are many cases cited in this article that support the main claim and there are only a few that seem to have conflicting findings.

Critique and Commentary

            This article will be a good help in my research and observations. I chose the claim from our book that there is some kind of generation difference because I did my observation at Barnes n Noble bookstore. While I was there, the biggest thing that stood out to me was how different people were acting based on their age. Older people meandered around picking up books and flipping through a few pages while younger people seemed to be in a hurry, looking to either bypass the store completely or find what they wanted and get out quickly. These observations go well with the claim that there are different gender personalities that the author of this article discusses.