Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Myths in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Fo
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Myths in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Forward Cort W. Rudolph 1
&
Rachel S. Rauvola 2 & David P. Costanza 3 & Hannes Zacher 4
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Talk about generations is everywhere and particularly so in organizational science and practice. Recognizing and exploring the ubiquity of generations is important, especially because evidence for their existence is, at best, scant. In this article, we aim to achieve two goals that are targeted at answering the broad question: “What accounts for the ubiquity of generations despite a lack of evidence for their existence and impact?” First, we explore and “bust” ten common myths about the science and practice of generations and generational differences. Second, with these debunked myths as a backdrop, we focus on two alternative and complementary frameworks—the social constructionist perspective and the lifespan development perspective—with promise for changing the way we think about age, aging, and generations at work. We argue that the social constructionist perspective offers important opportunities for understanding the persistence and pervasiveness of generations and that, as an alternative to studying generations, the lifespan perspective represents a better model for understanding how age operates and development unfolds at work. Overall, we urge stakeholders in organizational science and practice (e.g., students, researchers, consultants, managers) to adopt more nuanced perspectives grounded in these models, rather than a generational perspective, to understand the influence of age and aging at work. Keywords Generations . Generational differences . Constructionist perspectives . Lifespan development
People commonly talk about generations and like to make distinctions between them. Purported differences between generations have been blamed for everything from declining interest in baseball (Keeley, 2016) to changing patterns of processed cheese consumption (Mulvany & Patton, 2018). In the workplace, generations and generational differences have been credited for everything from declining levels of work ethic (e.g., Cenkus, 2017; cf. Zabel, BiermeierHanson, Baltes, Early, & Shepard, 2017), to higher rates of “job-hopping” (e.g., Adkins, 2016; cf. Costanza, Badger,
* Cort W. Rudolph [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA
2
Department of Psychology, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA
3
Department of Organizational Sciences & Communication, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA
4
Institute of Psychology – Wilhelm Wundt, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
Fraser, Severt, & Gade, 2012). Despite their ubiquity, a consensus is coalescing across multiple literatures that suggests that all the attention garnered by generations and generational differences (e.g., Lyons & Kuron, 2014; Twenge, 2010) has been “much ado about nothing” (
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