Exploring the experience of generational stereotypes among employees within South African organisations

Abstract

As the workplace has become more and more diverse over the last few decades, the interactions between and among individuals have raised various concerns of how these interactions impact the employee, human resource management and the overall organisation. The workplace includes employees from various age groups, also known as generational cohorts, such as generation X and millennials (also known as generation Y). Each generation is defined by their own set of values, attributes, personalities and characteristics. Along with the different generations working alongside each other, it is inevitable that generational differences would exist among them. As a result of these generational differences between employees, generational stereotypes may occur. Generational stereotypes are defined as inaccurate and unsupported beliefs about certain qualities and characteristics about a generational group. Both generation X and millennials have experienced stereotypes against them and have had stereotypes against other generational groups. These stereotypes have far-reaching implications not only for the organisation as a whole, but also for the employee and specifically HR. Stereotypes have the potential to impact employees’ productivity, innovations, job satisfactions and self-esteem, and the likelihood of leaving the job is fairly good. If employees are aware of the stereotypes against them, their behaviour and performance may decline, as they believe that the stereotypes are true. These implications can further impact the organisation in terms of a decrease in productivity and performance of employees and the result thereof is that the organisation cannot perform financially, competitively and not being able to reach all their goals effectively and efficiently. Human resource management is the central point of any organisation and plays various roles. One of the main roles is to initiate top performance from all employees. Thus, the negative generational stereotypes compromise the performance of employees. As previously mentioned, stereotypes impact employees’ likelihood to leave the organisations due to these negative stereotypes, which leaves HR with a higher turnover intention number than expected.