«You cannot ignore generation Z»

What attitudes do Norwegians born between 1995 and 2010 have towards working life?

Abstract

Generational theory, which describes how Boomers, X, Y and Z differ from each other in terms of attitudes and values, has become a recurring theme in popular culture. The discussion often centres on what the characteristics of new generations mean for working life. "You can't ignore Generation Z", a Norwegian management magazine recently stated, and then presented advice on how to deal with employees born between 1995 and 2010 (Skrede, 2020). The media, consultants and researchers are all concerned about how companies should now organise themselves to recruit the youngest people and get them to perform at their best. In several countries, generation-based management has become a niche in business counselling, the core of which is that employees should be managed in specific ways based on their generational affiliation. Generational theory assumes that it is possible to isolate the effect of year of birth on individuals' attitudes and behaviour. However, the evidence for such a relationship is uncertain. The existence of homogeneous generations is disputed, as are the usual descriptions of them. In this article, we use Norwegian survey data from a master thesis (Slåtto & Tande, 2021) to investigate whether a sample from Generation Z has attitudes towards work that a) conform to five common stereotypes and b) differ significantly from the responses of a diverse and significantly older control group (40-67 years). The two groups' mean responses are compared using t-tests. The findings show that Generation Z only resembles the stereotype in some respects, and that the differences between younger and older people are smaller than popular variants of generational theory would suggest. The spread in the responses was only in a few cases significantly smaller in the Generation Z group.