From Baby Boomers to Gen Alpha: Study suggests generalizations about generational gaps are wrong

Cliches about the behavior of those born in different decades cause tension and misunderstandings among people. It is said that baby boomers have an excessively performance-driven world view; that Gen X’ers are self-reliant, self-directed, and individualistic; Gen Y’ers spend all their time in front of digital screens; Gen Z’ers put more of an emphasis on finding their dream job; and spoiled Millennials don’t like to work hard, tend to postpone marriage, and live with their parents for longer amounts of time. 

For those looking to make sense of the differences, there are tons of books and guides available, all aiming to explain just what it is exactly that makes a particular generation tick. Sociology Professor Martin Schröder at Saarland University in Germany investigated the myths and facts. “A publisher offered me a lucrative book deal if I was able to show that Millennials tick differently than older generations,” he recalled. So he set about analyzing hundreds of thousands of datasets spanning four decades.” He has just published his findings in the Journal of Business and Psychology under the title “Work Motivation Is Not Generational but Depends on Age and Period.”

The seven active generations from the beginning of the 20th century are: The Greatest Generation (born 1901-1924); The Silent Generation (born 1925-1945); Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964); Generation X (born 1965-1980); Millennials or Generation Y (born 1981-1998); Generation Z (born 1999-2016); and Generation Alpha (2013-). 

Because so much has been written about the subject and how regularly the topic crops up for discussion, the results were surprising: “I wasn't able to find anything to suggest that attitudes towards work and career are actually related to the year in which someone was born. The image of Millennials with their 20-hour week sitting on the beach in Bali coding “stuff for the web” or doing “something with media” is at best simply a cliché,” Schröder said.

“And then there’s the one about Boomers who were on the verge of burnout in their mid-fifties but made the country (and them) rich thanks to working 70-hour weeks for decades while their family life lay in ruins.”

He continued, “Of course, as with all clichés, there’s a grain of truth in them, but when you take a closer look, the differences among the generations are not really that great at all. What turns out to be important is which stage of life people are in when they are asked about their work ethic or their attitude to work,” the German sociologist insisted. “The generational hypothesis states that attitudes expressed by individuals are strongly influenced by their birth year rather than by their age or by the year or historical time period in which they were surveyed.

"However, if one takes the latter two effects into account – known respectively as 'age effects’ and ‘period effects’ – then ‘generational effects’ become almost negligible.”

For example, if a 60-year-old person complains about a 15-year-old apprentice who is not really interested in doing night shifts and working weekends to earn more and climb the career ladder.

"It turns out that this is not really a generational issue. What we found is that all of us think and act differently than we did 30 years ago,” said Schröder. “It’s not our affiliation to a particular generation that explains our thinking, but rather which phase of our life we're in when asked about our attitude to work. Today, each of us thinks differently about the world than we did some years ago, and that's as true for the 15-year-old as it is for someone who’s now 60. If you ask different generations at the same time what they think about work, you’ll find their answers are essentially the same.' Put another way, work is no longer quite as important to us today as it was to society 50 years ago – and that's true regardless of whether we are 15 or 50.”

Schröder used data from almost 600,000 individuals from the Integrated Values Survey that polled people in 113 countries between 1981 and 2022 to determine their attitudes and values regarding work and career.

In addition to examining work motivation, he also mined this huge mountain of data to get a better understanding of the subjective importance of other factors, such as leisure time, good work hours, opportunities to show initiative, generous holidays, the feeling of being able to achieve something, having a responsible job, having an interesting job, having a job that matches well with one's own abilities, having pleasant people to work with and having the opportunity to meet pleasant people in your work. His key finding was that the generational cohort to which a respondent belonged had practically no effect on the answers given.

Why assumptions about generational gaps are prevalent in the workplace 

He suggested three reasons why the generational myth is so persistent in the workplace. "First, young people have always been less willing to work than middle-aged individuals, and all of us, regardless of age or year of birth, now see paid work as less important than was the case in the past. By confusing these age and period effects with generational effects, we’re seeing generations where there are, in fact, none," said Schröder.

"The second reason why we want to believe in generations seems to be "generationalism" – a new -ism that offers an overly simplified way of explaining the world. Our brain loves to put people into boxes because it allows us to see our social group as better than another, and this makes us feel good about ourselves. But thinking in 'isms is dangerous and, like sexism and racism, often illegal.

“If we’re not careful, we end up using unsupported generalizations that have no foundation in reality, he went on. It seems that the almost irresistible urge to categorize and, if we're not careful, to stereotype and discriminate on the basis of innate characteristics like skin color or gender also applies to another innate characteristic, namely, year of birth.”

The third reason he gave for tending to assume generational effects where there really are none is that, for some people, this claim is the basis for their livelihood, he said. “Put bluntly, ‘youth researchers’ and ‘generational gurus’ have to ignore scientific findings that contradict their business model because their income depends on continuing to sell ‘generationally tailored’ coaching sessions, books, and lecture series – all of which provide advice and guidance on what is ultimately a myth masquerading as fact.”