Chapter 2
Aren't We All Just the Same?
Society persists despite the mortality of its individual members, through process of demographic metabolism and particularly the annual infusion of birth cohorts. These may pose a threat to stability, but they also provide the opportunity for societal transformation.
—Norman Ryder
So What? Isn't Every Generation the Same?
When speaking about our research, we often face skeptics who ask, “Aren't Millennials the same as every other generation? Don't they challenge the status quo, push boundaries, and engage in an experimental lifestyle just as every generation did in its youth?”1 The answer to the second question is obviously “yes,” but that does not mean the answer to the first is too. Separating these two questions allows us to provide a useful response.
Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Think about this: Because of technology, Millennials are the first generation that does not need an authority figure to access information. Consequently, Millennials do not have a felt need to initiate a relationship with authority figures. Authority figures may be the last place a Millennial goes with a question. We believe the shift in behavior changes the dynamics of how Millennials relate to authority.
Maturational Theory
Before we make the argument for generational theory, it is important to entertain another explanation for how one's behavior and attitude are developed—maturational theory (the traditional belief that people change, mature, and develop their values, attitudes, and preferences as a function of age). As visual acuity, crawling, walking, and speaking are all the normative result of growing up or aging, so are attitudes and values. By observing the maturing process, we build expectations with respect to events like a child taking her first step, uttering his first word, or “knowing better.”
Arnold Gesell established the concept of developmental norms in his quest to understand by what age a certain attitude or behavior should generally be observable. If a child at age 4 tells tall tales, the parent must recognize the nature of the child's immaturity and not be alarmed. Who hasn't been warmed by a small child's imaginative fibs? But when the child is age 16, we are no longer inclined to be entertained. Instead of characterizing the utterances as “imaginative” or calling them “fibs,” concerned parents will try to determine the appropriate response for the lie. Gesell viewed biological development as the major determinant to behavior.2
Even developmental norms are being rethought as a result of Millennial activity. Within the last decade psychologists have suggested that there is a new life stage in the developmental cycle called emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 25). Emerging adulthood fills the gap between later adolescence and young adulthood. Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett explains, “Emerging adulthood is distinguished by relative independence from social roles and from normative expectations. Having left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood, emerging adults often explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and worldviews. Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life's possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course.”3
Statistics show that young adults are putting off career, marriage, child rearing, and other milestones longer than the generations before them. They are even putting off getting a driver's license. We consider transitioning into work-life to be the first major challenge of becoming an adult.
Generational Theory
It is true that all generations exhibit characteristics of youth, but their values and attitudes about work and life depend on so much more. Take, for instance, the aforementioned questions of what are the appropriate ages to move out of a parent's home, get married, and start a career. We argue that the answers to such questions lie beyond maturational theory.
Why is it that one generation considers a 25-year-old still living at home as unthinkable and another considers it normal? Why is one generation more comfortable than another with the concept of stay-at-home dads? Why are Builders likely to have had one career and labored for one or two companies their entire work life, while Baby Boomers are reported as having as many as three careers and more likely to change companies than their predecessors?
In 1981, Baby Boomer Howard Schultz was making more than $70,000 a year as a salesman for Hammarplast AB, a Swedish conglomerate that manufactures plastics for home and medical use. Schultz left his stable and successful position at Hammarplast to work for a two-store coffee enthusiast hangout in Seattle. Today, thanks to Schultz's vision and leadership, Starbucks has more than 23,000 outlets worldwide and is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. At the time Schultz made his transition, however, his mother thought he was crazy. Playing her part, she dutifully advised him, “Don't give it up for a small company no one has ever heard of!”4 Stability and company loyalty are high values for Builders like those whose worldviews were shaped by experiencing the Great Depression in their formative years. But the work world has changed even more since Schultz's early career. Today, college career counselors are advising tomorrow's workers that they can expect to have as many as five to seven careers and to labor for several companies during their work stint.
It is fascinating that each generation has a set of values, attitudes, and beliefs that inform their behavior. It is not merely a function of getting older. It is also a function of culture.
German sociologist Karl Mannheim is credited with establishing generational theory, which seeks to explain how attitudes and values are shaped in both individuals and groups. Mannheim thought that the generation a person belongs to determines, to a certain extent, his or her thoughts, feelings, and even behaviors. A generation is defined as a group that shares birth years and significant life events at critical developmental stages. Youth is the key period in which social generations are formed.5 The major events experienced during the time of formation are what shapes the outlook on the world exhibited by that generation. Another term for Mannheim's generation is age cohort. In the sociological literature, the terms generation and cohort are often used interchangeably.
The passing of time as experienced in a sociological context facilitates a keen sense of generation. Christopher Bollas explains, “They can define it clearly, differentiate it from older and younger generations, and in some respects analyze why their generation is the way it is.”6 Consequently, Builders, Baby Boomers, and Gen X(ers) can easily and readily identify what is different between their age cohort and others. It is not until one becomes conscious of generational difference that one can develop genuine relationships between generations.7
Life Course Theory
Life course theory is a multidisciplinary human development theory that is complemented by generational theory. In life course theory, demographers, historians, developmental psychologists, and sociologists look for cohort effects. People who experience a sociological context at a similar age are likely to forge a perspective or mind-set that stays with them throughout their entire life.8 Examples of historical events that had powerful cohort effects are the Great Depression, World War II, the Beatles, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution, Women's Liberation, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle, the Columbine massacre, and most recently, the first African American elected to be president of the United States. All events are social markers that frame life experience and shape values, beliefs, and attitudes.
Whose death is more emotionally impacting—Elvis's or Michael Jackson's? Your answer will probably have more to do with your cohort effect than with the number of albums sold, concerts given, movies made, or net worth accumulated by either person. One cable news network juxtaposed the attention focused on Michael Jackson's passing with the media coverage of 20 American soldiers who lost their lives over the same period of time. The network anchor asserted that the soldiers' giving of their lives for our freedom deserved more attention than Jackson's death. While the point is well taken, the media attention was actually a sociological phenomena rather than a referendum on whose life was more significant. The preoccupation people had with Jackson's death was more about their own life, experience, and memories than about his. The fixation is referred to as cohort effect.
Collective Memories
Though published in 1988 by American Sociological Review, Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott shed further light on the Jackson phenomena in a research article titled “Generations and Collective Memories.” Collective memories is a term used to describe memories of a shared past that are retained by members of a group, large or small, that experienced it. The authors asked 1,410 Americans, 18 years and older, to think of “national or world events or changes” that have occurred over the past 50 years and to name one or two that seem to have been especially important to them. The survey found that memories of important political events and social changes are structured by age, and that adolescence and early adulthood is the primary period for generational imprinting in the sense of sociopolitical memories.
The authors' presupposition is that people will tend not to recall as important those events and changes that preceded their own lifetime. They take a developmental psychology lens and view youth as a kind of critical period for learning about the larger society. The authors also expected that most people will tend not to recall as important those events and changes that occur after their early adulthood. Therefore, the events that register most strongly during adolescence and early adulthood have the greater impact or influence in one's life.
Each age cohort tends to develop its own characteristic patterns of attitudes and expectations about what is and is not possible to achieve in life, about what is good and what is bad, and about whom to trust and what to fear. As an example, Generation X is the first generation in recent history that did not expect to be more affluent than its parents. Baby Boomers feared that their leaders would be assassinated, while Millennials fear that their friends will be assassinated. Builders trusted that their companies would take care of them if they were loyal.
“A cohort's size relative to the sizes of its neighbors is a persistent and compelling feature of its lifetime environment. As the new cohort reaches each major juncture in the life cycle, society has the problem of assimilating it.”9 Social change is partly the result of successive generations making their way and ultimately adapting formal and informal institutions to their way of seeing and working with the world. Sonia Austrian suggests, “People in successive cohorts or generations grow up and grow old in different ways because the surrounding sociological structures are changing. That is, the process of aging from birth to death is not entirely fixed by biology, but is influenced by changing structures and roles in which people lead their lives. The interplay between individual age and social change is cohort flow.”10 Members of successive cohorts age in new ways and therefore contribute to changes in the social structure.
Group and Age Norm Theory
The book's opening sentence asked if you had ever been puzzled by an encounter you had with someone from a different generation. Perhaps your experience was someone telling you rather than asking you when he or she was going to be taking time off. Maybe he or she spent an hour surfing the Web for a minor detail when the person could have solved the problem in a minute by simply picking up the telephone. Better yet, the person did not understand why you made him or her stay the whole day in the office even though he or she had completed the work.
The puzzlement is a result of not having a frame of reference for interpreting Millennial behavior. You know “what is acceptable” or “not acceptable” when you have been a part of establishing expectations. For the most part, Baby Boomers have set the rules for today's work expectations. When Generation X(ers) emerged on the scene, they challenged the Baby Boomers and Builders but simply did not have the numbers to shape the workplace the way they would have preferred it.
Every generation experiences shared sense-making. It is a process in which individuals jointly interpret their environment and create collective accounts or narratives from which they derive meaning from organizational events. It moves individual perceptions and feelings to the state of group knowledge. Another aspect of group process is emotional contagion. Members of a group influence the emotions and behavior of other group members through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotional states and behavioral attitudes.
As each age cohort's self-identity is strengthened, it makes comparisons of itself to other generations. Social comparison exaggerates the difference between groups (Baby Boomer/Millennial) but strengthens in-group similarity and cohesion. As individuals find similarity within the group and compare themselves favorably to members of other groups, group cohesion and group identity are strengthened. A good example of this is how managers are experiencing Millennials in the workplace. There is a coherent, if not unified, voice about what Millennials are like and a constant favorable comparison of themselves to the Millennials.
Who Gets to Do the Sense-Making and Set the Rules?
Which generation is more apt to use the term decorum? Decorum is defined as good manners or correctness. All four generations in the workplace have an idea of what is correct—three have come to consensus. We argue that much of the generational tension in the workforce is due to Millennials' desire to make their mark or imbue their values in the workplace. Okay, now we are back to “Doesn't every generation want to make an impact?” Yes! But, who gets to set the rules or make change?
One social concept that helps explain generational conflict in the workplace is age norm theory. Age norms are the ages viewed as standard or typical for a given role or status by the modal (dominant) group within a social system. There are several conceptions of norms, but most have three things in common.
Expectation
Expectation exists when there is a belief or a statement that specifies what response or behavior is expected in certain situations (what people ought to do). For instance, we have heard countless stories about how Millennials show up for interviews underdressed. When we quizzed the managers if they coached the interviewees on what to wear to the interview, they responded, “They should just know.”
Sanction
Sanction refers to the punishment of or disregard for people who violate an expectation (sometimes a sanction can be a reward). In the interview scenario, sanction would result in dismissing the candidate before the interview or simply ignoring their talent no matter how well they interviewed.
A Group
Finally, group refers to a social contract in which a group of people are aware of and believe in the social norm and punish or sanction those who deviate from the norm.
When we look at the formal age structure (i.e., those who are older are in charge), power resides with older cohorts who share ideals about work attitudes, values, and behaviors. It can be argued that the larger the cohort (or group), the greater the influence over norms and expectations. We believe that generational tension in the workplace is most acute when there is a renegotiation of expectation. According to the US Census Bureau,11 92 million people were born between 1980 and 2000 (Millennial cohort). Approximately 77 million Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. Gen X (61 million) is not a big enough group to challenge Baby Boomers, and even when the majority of Baby Boomers finally retire, Gen X will still be outnumbered by Millennials. Despite Baby Boomers opting to stay at work a little longer, Millennials already outnumber both them and Gen X in the workplace. Millennials may not use the word decorum but they certainly will be helping to shape it.
It is important to note that sometimes violating group norms can result in reward or affirmation. For instance, an American teenager who enters college at age 16 is held in high esteem even though her advancement is not normal. In the same respect, skydiving is not an age-appropriate activity for a 94-year-old, but we admire and applaud such antics. In our opinion, many of the Millennials who are promoted into management get the invite because they appear different from their peers—more mature. They take an interest in their superiors and are able to reach up and make a connection. Therefore, they draw the attention and favor of the older generations. We found that approximately one in five Millennials take the initiative to connect with their superiors.
It is interesting that many refuse to acknowledge the idea that age cohorts can have distinct values and beliefs from one another. Critics are dismissive of the notion of difference and espouse the dangers of overgeneralizing cohort distinctiveness. Ironically, their argument in itself is a generalization—“We all are the same and want the same things.”
We readily admit that when one seeks to better understand a phenomenon there is a danger of looking for information that confirms one's belief but ignores data that suggest otherwise. When it comes to perceptions about Millennials, we believe there is an element of selective attention. Selective attention is the process of filtering attention so that it can be directed. Psychologist Anne Treisman suggests that the filtering process is more about giving specific attention rather than filtering out information.12 The term she uses is attenuation, and it is like having three sources of stimulation (TV, conversation, or a dog barking), you can turn down two in order to pay attention to the third. There is little doubt that managers are more tuned into the behaviors of Millennials (particularly negative ones) over other age cohorts. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can also be defensive, abrasive, and self-absorbed, but it often goes unnoticed or not commented on.
We want managers to continue to focus on Millennials but with a more clear understanding of their values and behaviors. Studies like ours allow for a healthy pause and reflection on what is really happening.