Today's young workers

Today's young workers


Nowadays, young workers represent the workforce that will be in place in a few years. Whether we support it or not, people from several generations are now working side-by-side. The common idea would have say that people are built by the generation to which they belong, and thus share the same behaviors and believes. Yet is generation a fact that really matters when talking about work values? Did those values have fundamentally changed depending on the passing years? We will, in this essay first describe the generations and work values, and then discuss the different values showed among generations, supported by a time-lag study (which are on our mind the most relevant). Secondly, we will show an understanding about stereotypes that give directions to beliefs. Then we will go further by responding to the saying that ‘today’s young workers don’t have the same values that have been previously shared in the workplace.’



By consulting the period ‘1980-2015’ (35 years earlier until today), we can focus our analysis on three major generations in the workplace.
A generation is defined as an identifiable group that shares birth years, age,
location and significant life events (Kupperschmidt, 2000). Generations that we are focusing on in this case study are respectively the Boomers, the Gen-X and the Gen-Y (also called Gen-Me or Millenials).
The Baby boomers’ generation concern people born between 1946-1965, generation X people born between 1966-1976, and Millenials between 1977-1994.
“Work values” are the end-values such as satisfaction; quality or reward individuals seek from their work (Super, 1970). Elizur (1984) defined work values as the importance individuals place on certain outcomes related to attributes of work.
There is many work values, such as work-centrality, leadership, power, recognition, work-life balance, power…
The work values can also be dividing in two different categories: the intrinsic (opportunity for self-expression,...

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