Last month I was at a gathering of human resource professionals where the conversation turned to workplace differences between 25, 35, and 45-year-olds. People in the crowd noted recent studies showing differences in the character of Millennial workers vs. those of Generation X and Y. One voice of dissent exclaimed, “I don’t like being labeled as a Millennial.” At last, some critical thinking has emerged!
For the past several years I’ve doubted consultants who have proclaimed that there are profound and important differences among the generations in the workplace. They cite survey research revealing generational differences in attitudes toward work, what motivates people, and so forth. I’ll acknowledge that there may be some differences among the generations, but I’m suspect of the research. Most of it is cross-sectional – a technique that simply compares different groups at a snapshot in time. It reminds me of some of the studies done on aging fifty years ago.
In the 1960’s as our older adult population began to expand, researchers on aging tried to identify the average, expectable changes that occur as people get older. Much of the existing research was cross-sectional; that is, different age groups were compared to one another at a point in time. In a typical study, thirty year olds, fifty year olds, and seventy year olds might be compared to each other on various measures (e.g. memory, reaction time, verbal fluency), and the differences among the groups were thought to reflect fairly universal age-related changes (“age-effects”). Thoughtful researchers recognized that these changes might not be quite so universal. They suspected that future groups of 70-year-olds might not experience the exact same changes. They believed that a different research methodology was needed, one that recognized that with each decade or so, there was a new “cohort” of 70-year-olds who had lived through different experiences than the 70-year-olds who came before them. They developed a far more sophisticated long-term research methodology (called "cross-sequential") that allowed them to tease out which changes were truly age-related and which were more likely due to cohort effects.
Unfortunately most of what has been said about Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennial’s in the workplace is based on simplistic cross-sectional research. Those who promote this pseudoscience have focused on “cohort effects” while ignoring age-effects and the impact of the labor market. I predict that within a few years we’ll see that much of what has been hyped as true, enduring, and meaningful differences between the generations of workers – will be found to be nothing of the sort.
