Article: Mixing and Managing Four Generations of Employees

This article both outlines the differences between four generations of Americans and explains why their individual traits often lead to conflicts at work and in society in general. The author stresses generational communication throughout the article, focusing on what he believes to be the main reason the generations have trouble joining their ideas. His concerns rest mostly on the methods that each generation uses to get information, and the kinds of information that each generation retains. While Veterans and Baby boomers are more personally and educationally oriented, Gen Xers and GenYers are more used to indirect communication and educationally skeptical. The author offers a few ideas on how to manage employees of different generations. Most of his solutions involve pairing employees of compatible generations together. The success of the method of pairing hypothetically comes from the traits that he has assigned to each generation.

While this was a good article for informational purposes, I don't think that it has much merit towards the latter half. While it was interesting to know some broad traits of each generation, and to have the names of each generation spelled out for me, the article seemed purely hypothetical to me. Sure, there were some good observations about how each generation learns, communicates, and which values they adhere to. The problem is that the separations of each generation are admittedly vague, and I feel as though coming up with scenarios for workers of a certain generation based on the traits outlined in the chart in the article is misleading. All in all, the article was enlightening, but I think that the author could have stopped at his early observations. It would have been sufficient to raise awareness of differences and come up with some ideas for inclusion, rather than make specific hypothetical situations based on the workplace to exercise some ideas.