Nancy Schullery’s article, published in this issue of Business Communication Quarterly, partially explains the failure of workplace satisfaction/motivation/engagement theorists to deliver a conclusive answer to the question posed earlier. The answer is deceptively simple: The age of an employee and the generational cohort to which the employee belongs may illumine those values most responsible for causing the individual to become emotionally engaged with a job. Herzberg, writing in the 1960s and for several subsequent decades, focused on intrinsic factors (subjective feelings experienced
by an employee) as genuine motivators; Schullery indicates that this may be valid for the baby boomer generation (persons born between 1946 and 1964). By contrast, Buckingham and Coffman and other employee engagement theorists maintain that an extrinsic variable, quality of supervision, is the most reliable predictor of engagement. The evidence marshaled in Schullery’s article could explain this turn to the extrinsic in generational terms: Millenials (employees born between 1982 and 1999) are more likely to be motivated by extrinsic rewards, such as salary and benefits, than are baby boomers. In other words, psychological studies of motivation may be measuring only the historically (and perhaps ulturally) relative values prevalent among employees at the time the research is conducted. Thus, the findings of Mayo,
Herzberg, and Buckingham and Coffman are not necessarily inconsistent or invalid; rather, the validity of these findings is time sensitive. Schullery maintains that four generations currently occupy the American workplace and that each generally
adheres to slightly differing values. It is the problem of managers no mean feat to recognize these values and to develop assignments and projects that will most effectively engage the identified values.