Group Project
Team VIBGYOR – GMP 2015, Sec B, Group 8

The Topic:

Impact of Generational Diversity on Team Performance.

1. Introduction:

"A lack of understanding across generations can have detrimental effects on communication, working relationships and undermine effective services," says psychologist Constance Patterson.

Although these generational conflicts are often seen as larger social issues, they may play out every day on the team level in the workplace in ways that may affect productivity and may lead to frustration, conflict and poor morale.

For example, Boomers may believe gen Xers are too impatient and unwilling to try out the tried-and-tested strategies, while gen Xers may view boomers as always trying to say the right thing to the right person and being inflexible to change. Traditionalists may view baby boomers as self-absorbed and prone to sharing too much information, and baby boomers may view traditionalists as authoritative and rigid. And, gen Xers may consider millennial too spoiled and self-absorbed, while millennial may view gen Xers as too cynical and negative. 2. Background:

A generation is defined as an identifiable group that shares birth years, age location, and significant life events at critical developmental stages, divided by five-seven years into the first wave, core group, and last wave (Kupperschmidt, 2000). A generational group, often referred to as a cohort, includes those who share historical or social life experiences, the effects of which are relatively stable over the course of their lives. These life experiences tend to distinguish one generation from another (Jurkiewicz & Brown, 1998). A cohort develops a personality that influences a person's feelings toward authority and organizations, what they desire from work, and how they plan to satisfy those desires (Kupperschmidt, 2000).

Team performance is defined as the extent to which a team accomplishes its goals or mission (Devine & Philips, 2001). Because team members interact interdependently in order to be
Successful, team members must engage in a number of team processes or “interdependent acts that convert inputs to outcomes through cognitive, verbal, and behavioural activities directed toward Organizing task work to achieve collective goals” (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001, p. 357). Successful performance for any team requires members who can complete the technical portions of the team goals or mission (i.e., have specialized expertise), as well as effectively navigate team processes. In general, team composition is thought to be related to team performance because it affects the amount of knowledge and skill team members have to apply to the team task—in terms of both task completion and working interdependently (Hackman, 1987).

3. Research: Frederick Herzberg’s well known Two-Factor Theory has introduce a simple yet distinctive factors of employees’ motivations. The setting of theory has separated employees’ motivation factors into Extrinsic and Intrinsic.

Intrinsic factors: Achievements, promotion, Recognition, Work Itself
Extrinsic factors: pay and benefits, Work condition, Company Policy and Administration

The study investigated by (MURRAY R. BARRICK, MICHAEL K. MOUNT) the relation of the “Big Five” personality dimensions (Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) to three job performance criteria (job proficiency, training proficiency, and personnel data) for five occupational groups (professionals, police, managers, sales, and skilled/semi-skilled). Results indicated that one dimension of personality, Conscientiousness, showed consistent relations with all job performance criteria for all occupational groups. For the remaining personality dimensions, the estimated true score correlations varied by occupational group and criterion type.

The overall finding from more than 100 research investigations is that there is no significant difference between the job performance of older and younger workers. The average correlation coefficient is about +0.06 but separate correlations range from -0.44 to +0.66 (McEvoy and Cascio 1989, Warr 1994). Research results demonstrate differences between job and different dimensions of performance, but the general pattern is clear: there is no overall difference between the performance observed for older and younger staff in the same job. Incidentally in almost every case variations with in an age group far exceed the age difference between age groups.

Hypothesis1: There are personality and motivational driver differences across the generations in a team.
Hypothesis2:
Generational Diversity has a negative relation to the overall performance of a team. 4. Methodology Instruments, Interviewers and respondents:

Questionnaire is one way of collecting information. It is an effective research method, since it saves time and effort from the researcher. Research material can be vast; one can include a lot of respondents and questions in the same study. (Hirsijärvi et al. 2009, 195.) However, like Bell (2010) notes, there are several issues, which should be addressed in order to conduct a successful questionnaire. Those issues include a great discipline in the selection of questions, in question writing, in the design, piloting, distribution and return of the questionnaires. (Op.cit. p.140)

Multiple choice questions provide responses, which are easy to analyse afterwards. They will also decrease the amount of diverse responses, which will help the researcher to compare the results. (Hirsijärvi et at. 2009, 201.)

1974 Questionnaire and resulting sample
To examine these research questions, we closely examined the research conducted by Cherrington in 1974 and reported in several publications (Cherrington et al, 1975-conference paper; Cherrington 1976—unpublished manuscript; Cherrington, Condie, & England, 1979), including his book on the study. The work ethic (1980). Cherrington's questionnaire served as a model for our questionnaire.
1999 Questionnaire
In final 1999 questionnaire we attempted to use identical or similar response choices, which included a 7-item Likert-type scale, a 10-item Likert-type scale, and semantic differential scales, using bipolar adjective pairs.
Sampling criterion and data collection
In an attempt to replicate Cherrington's sample, albeit on a much smaller scale, we mailed each participant ten surveys, asking the participant to complete one and give the remaining nine to team members so that we can cover generational diversity within that group.

5. Results:

This section of the report would summarize the number of teams from different organizations surveyed, their team size and the number of individuals in the team falling in to the various generational buckets there by indicating the rate of generation diversity, the responses received from each bucket quantified under the various sections of the questionnaire which tends to measure the performance based on factors driving personality and motivation. 6. Discussion/Conclusion:

This Project would seek to find objective answers to questions some of which identified so far are listed here

What the team members perceive are the positive and negative aspects of working with other members of the team who are from a different generational bucket?

What are the personality and motivational drivers of each of the team member? The drivers team members choose would be classified based on the generational bucket and quantified. This data would be summarized for the respective teams. The more evenly the teams are generationally diversified the better insights this data would give on the topic of research.

What the Managers think are the personality and motivational drivers of team members belonging to each of the generational buckets in their team?

The feedbacks from both the sides (team members and Managers) would help take balanced approach on analysing the survey data.

How the team members feel the members from a different generational bucket score/contribute in various performance measures like timeliness of delivery, exceeding the expectations, team cohesiveness, customer satisfaction, appraisals, promotions etc? The feedback from Manager on these questions would help cross verify the validity of the data. 7. Strengths & Weaknesses:

Strengths:

Firstly, A review of the existing literature suggests that while previous research has examined differences in work values across generations (e.g. Smola and Sutton, 2002; Yu and Miller, 2003), research findings examining generational differences in personality and motivational drivers in the workplace have been limited. Given the changing age demographic of the global workforce, it is now possible for up to four different generations of employees to be working together within one organization. As such, it is increasingly important for us to better understand these generational differences, and determine if these differences truly exist.
Secondly, By choosing the Questionnaire type of data collection method, we will be able to have a fixed pattern of questions and a fixed pattern of answers so that outcome would be of narrowed focus. Also, questionnaires are easy to reach people who are spread across a wide geographical area saving research time. Thirdly, our survey includes various sectors across the board so the internal factors of an organization may have minimal influence the outcome.

Weaknesses:

Firstly, Time being a restricting factor the possibility of soliciting out to multiple teams comprising of varying degree of generational diversity is constrained. Secondly, Reactive effects may occur e.g., interviewees may try to show only what is socially desirable.
Thirdly, The Survey includes Teams from various Organizations, Nationalities and Sectors. Cultures and Norms specific to the individual entity may tend to bias some of the Observations. Fourthly, Most of the Journals considered from the various Journal Databases are American whose relevance to “rest of the world” context is debatable. 8. Bibliography