L02 Generational Differences

Many universities circulate to their faculty at the beginning of each new academic year a short memo reminding them of how different they are from most of their students. The issue is most obvious in the traditional residential environment where freshmen are generally 18 years old. An example from 1980 might read:

• Incoming freshmen were not alive when the Soviet Union launched the first person into space.
• They do not remember the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.
• They in all likelihood had never watched Rin Tin Tin or the Lone Ranger on television.

The memo was a reminder that faculty had very different life experiences compared to students, causing faculty to be mindful, among other things, of not assuming that everyone in class would understand the world in which they grew up.

In the past several decades, the issue of discrete generations populating the workplace has become an area which scholars and practitioners have studied. The primary concern are the differences between generations that affect individual and organizational performance. As one writer indicates,

Generations refer to cohorts of people based on shared experiences at similar ages. The assumption is that shared experiences at similar ages create similarities among people in terms of personal attributes, attitudes, personalities, political orientations and other dispositions, such as work-related attitudes and behaviors (Heathfield, 2019)

At the same time there are commentators who caution us against placing too much emphasis on attributing problems at work to differences in the generations, a controversy we won’t attempt to resolve in this course. What we can assert with confidence is that learning to communicate with groups who grew up with a different set of life experiences can be very challenging.