1.1 Academic Rationale
Human resource professionals, researchers and managers are now more interested than ever about how to manage a multigenerational workforce. A long struggle with finding the perfect management strategies for employees is still ongoing. This task of finding the right management styles comes increasingly difficult as the current and future workforce consists of members from different generations; Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and even Generation Z. A lot of interest in the area is based on the assumption that generations significantly differ in their goals, expectations and work values, meaning that what motivates them and how they are motivated also differs from one another (Sutton Bell and Narz 2007;
Smola and Sutton 2002). Although this assumption is very much noted and written about, there is relatively little empirical evidence to support it (Cennamo and Gardner 2008). Generation Y, also known as the Millenials and Net Generation (Alch 2000), are currently the largest living and working generation, which makes research into them highly important in hopes of finding the best ways to motivate them in the workplace (Barford and Hester 2011). The aim of this research project is to examine what are the key motivational aspects that need to be focused on in order to motivate Generation Y individuals at a workplace, and whether the four-drive theory (Nohria et al. 2008) and the four-drive model (Shafi et al. 2015) are applicable when it comes to work motivation of Generation Y.
1.2 Personal Rationale
I first came across questions about work motivation during my university placement year, when I worked for an organization that had very little interest in the well-being and motivation of their employees. This organization, in my eyes, failed to motivate their employees to a point where they would have felt a sense of belonging or any kind of obligation towards the organization to improve their work. I personally, was not satisfied with my job, even though I felt like the organization would have had the perfect setting to make this happen. As I discovered that I was not alone with my feelings of demotivation, it inspired me to conduct a small research during my placement, which could possibly improve the experience of future students working there. Following this non-academic research, which I did with the help of my placement year coordinator, I was still highly interested to discover what motivated me personally. During the work placement year I learned that I did not care as much about extrinsic rewards as I had previously thought, and intrinsic aspects such as being able to challenge
myself, feel a sense of belonging and to feel appreciated, felt highly important. I started to wonder whether I was alone feeling like this, or if my feelings towards motivation would be common amongst my generation and if our motivational drivers differ from the previous generations. I did my bachelor thesis on the same subject, and conducted a quantitative research exploring what motivates Generation Y within a workplace. The results of the quantitative research showed that in order to motivate Generation Y individuals, several different aspects of motivation needed to be satisfied in order for them to feel motivated and the importance of intrinsic rewards were highlighted. The results also showed that there was a difference between Generation Y workers and Generation X workers when it came to their work motivation. The subject still fascinates me, and I wanted to gain deeper knowledge and understanding regarding the motivation of Generation Y. This lead me into this master thesis project; a qualitative research into motivation of Generation Y. Overall the goal is not to gain statistics or generalization, or even to compare Generation Y individuals to previous generations. The main goal of this master thesis to try to understand the behavior of individuals within Generation Y and gain deeper understanding into how they are motivated within a workplace and whether their views and understanding regarding their own motivation are unified.
1.3 Overview of work motivation and Generation Y
Work motivation is a set of forces, which originate both within as well as beyond an individual’s being, to initiate work-related behavior and to determine its direction, duration, form and intensity (Pinder 1998). So why is work motivation so important to understand? According to Simon (1997), the most basic challenge for any organization is getting their employees to work towards mutual goals. This gets even more difficult by the simple fact that motives are not permanent, and many things such as social context and culture (Korzynski 2013; Matei 2013) affect them. Organizational, technological and generational changes also add their own difficulties to the subject (Korzynski 2013). Psychological factors, such as job satisfaction, commitment and work engagement have been recognized as extremely important to establish the full effectiveness of employees (Meyer et al. 1993; Sonnentag 2003). All of these concepts are closely related to motivation and overlap to great extent in literature.
A generation can be defined as an identifiable group, or cohort, which shares birth years, age, location, and significant life events at critical development stages (Kupperschmidt 2008).
Palase, et al. (2006) categorize generations as those born within the same historical timeframe and culture, and Crumpacker and Crumpacker (2007) add that the birth rate, and the historical
events surrounding them, defines each generation. Differences between generations are most often explained with changes due to experience, ageing as well as life and career stages.
Nevertheless, since there has been many changes to work and each generation was introduced to working life at a different period, it can be assumed that work value difference can exist between generations (Cennamo and Gardner 2008). These differences between different generations are manifested in beliefs and values about work, work ethics, work related goals as well as what is expected from work (Smola and Sutton 2002).
Generation Y, most often defined as individuals born between 1980 and 2000, is no longer the newest generation to have entered the workforce, as some Generation Z members have already made their way to professional life, but Generation Y is the largest generation since the baby boomers (Cennamo and Gardner 2008) and are now dominating the workforce. As the members of Generation Y have not been part of the workforce for too long, there has been limited opportunity to truly study and understand their work values. Circumstantial information characterizes individuals of Generation Y as ones to value work-life balance, career development, learning and social aspects of work more than any previous generation (Smola and Sutton 2002; Wong et al. 2008). Since Generation Y will be dominating the workforce for at least the next decade or two, it is important for managers and human resource management professionals to understand how to assist the individuals within Generation Y in order to flourish as professionals, in order to secure good organizational performance.
In the workforce, Generation Y individuals are result-oriented and often enjoy pressure, as well as show significant interests for working in teams and being collaborative (Shih and Allen 2007). Similarly, to their preceding generation, Generation Y members have partitioned themselves away from the organization (Dries et al. 2008) as they acknowledge that lifetime employment at any organization is highly unlikely, and this might have an effect on their organizational commitment level and motivation. Generation Y individuals can be viewed as much more difficult to motivate and manage compared to the previous generations as they expect multiple changes of workplace during their lifetime (Morton 2002); Kim et al.2009).
Generation Y individuals also have a lot of demands and expectations such as their talents to be utilized and appreciated (Kim et al. 2009; Weingarten 2009), continuous professional development and proactive career planning (Westerman and Yamamura 2007; Kim et al. 2009) as well as lifelong learning (Alch 2000).
1.4 Research questions
RQ1. How do individuals within Generation Y view and perceive their work motivation?
RQ2. How are individuals within Generations Y motivated?
RQ3. Is the four-drive theory applicable to Generation Y and their work motivation?
Do Generation Y individuals view all drives important when it comes to their work motivation?
RQ4. Which drives motivate Generation Y individuals at work the most, and what the least?
RQ5. Does individual’s life situation have an effect on their perception of work motivation?