Generations

Generations



Generations

If it is hard to get people from various generations to reach any agreement, it is even harder to do so within a corporation. Cristina Simón, professor at the Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid, has identified and analyzed the four generations that currently make up the corporate work force. Her study is called, “Generation Y and the Labor Market: Models for HR Management.” Gayle Allard, another member of the IE staff, collaborated on the project along with Adecco, a company that supplies temporary workforce services.

 In an interview with Universia-Knowledge@Wharton, Simón explains the differences between groups of workers, which she identifies as  traditional workers,' 'baby boomers,' 'generation X' and 'generation Y.' She also suggests key steps for enabling a twenty-first century corporation to successfully overcome the generational duel that takes place between traditional workers and more recent arrivals.

Although there are differences from country to country, we can generally identify four generational groups that are currently active professionally:

 Traditional workers (born before 1946): They value loyalty and discipline, and they respect authority and hierarchy. These workers played the key role in their companies when economic development was strong.

 Baby Boomers (1946-1960): Their critical years for joining the work force - between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1970s - were a period when most European countries enjoyed significant progress. This led to great expectations of success. Currently, this group occupies positions of higher corporate responsibility, and has the largest proportion of workaholics in history. This is also the generation that gave birth to the “Yuppie” phenomenon.

 Generation X (1961-1979): This generation has the best academic training and international experience in history. They have begun to make a break with traditional patterns of behavior, demanding a more informal environment and abandoning hierarchical authority in favor of a more horizontal and flexible structure. They have pioneered policies that involve flexibility and conciliation. This generation is rich in entrepreneurs because personal initiative predominates within a context of skepticism toward large enterprises.

 Generation Y (starting from 1980): Generation Y is the first in history to have lived their entire lives with information technology. It is not easy for them to understand the world without it. Like members of Generation X, their childhood was comfortable and prosperous. They are more individualistic than earlier generations and demand autonomy in their opinions and behavior. They emphasize personal activities above social and labor considerations.

Common life experiences more clearly define each generational group. For example, traditional workers were born during the war [World War II] and the post-war period. As a result, they were raised in an environment of scarcity, which led to the fact that they value austerity. They defend such social goals as peace and national prosperity. Baby Boomers, on the other hand, spawned a series of social phenomena based on their strong reaction to their parents, such as the hippie movement, feminism and [freedom to] divorce. Both X and Y groups have had less social impact, I believe, because they emerged more recently and have not been analyzed ...