Guest editorial: The millennial manager: changes and challenges in organizations

Citation

He, L. and Janney, J.J. (2022), "Guest editorial: The millennial manager: changes and challenges in organizations", Management Research Review, Vol. 45 No. 5, pp. 597-598. https://doi.org/10.1108/MRR-05-2022-867

As the youngest of the baby boomer generation nears retirement age, the millennial generation (1981–1996) is now the largest demographic in the workforce, with all but nontraditional millennial college students having completed college. The oldest millennials are now turning 40 and within the next ten years will become a significant portion of the managerial workforce. How then will the workforce change as their values become the dominant values? In this special issue on millennial managing, Guest editors Aaron Buchko and Katherine Karl present seven articles exploring how the workplace is changing, both in terms of values and techniques.

The first three articles all study millennial workplace values. In Imagining Positive Workplaces: Extrapolating Relationships between Job Crafting, Mental Toughness and Authentic Happiness in Millennial Employees, Rajneesh Choubisa, Namita Ruparel and Seth Himanshu explore how challenging job demands are relevant for predicting authentic happiness. In addition, they discover how mental toughness becomes an essential component for employee happiness. Similarly, a study of Turkish family business by Hasan Tutar, Ahmet Tuncay Erdem and Ömer Karademïr confirm that millennials seek greater autonomy, with less loyalty to a given employer. Purpose and benefits may be better incentives for this cohort. Finally, Kerri Camp, Marilyn Young and Stephen Bushardt update the Mumford Skills Model for millennial managers. More tech savvy than their peers, like the other articles, they find millennial managers value personal values over organizational loyalty, and seek a healthy work–life balance.

Leah Omilion-Hodges, Scott Shank and Christine Packard are Doubting the connection: Millennials’ perceptions of the link between higher education and workplace readiness. Students view Business Schools’ professors as managers, and model their workplace understanding based on that dynamic. They find that students who proactively engage faculty will now use similar strategies in the workplace, which will benefit them.

The final three articles examine the Generation Z (1997–mid-2010s) now entering the workforce. Eugenia Tzoumaka, Antigone Kyrousi and Stella Leivadi examine perceptions of the employability for Generation Z and find that Generations X and Z differ over the relative importance of hard and soft skills for initial workforce readiness. Generation Z view prefers creativity to adaptability, which may negatively affect managerial perceptions of their work readiness. The authors see a relationship between various personality facets related to self-perceptions of employability. Karin Becker and Jessica Stollings-Holder examine the COVID-19’s workplace impact on Generation Z. Despite being more tech savvy, the increased use of “zoom meetings” engenders less positive affect for Generation Z. They use technology, but recognize it is less rich for interpersonal relationship development. Relying too heavily upon it makes the workplace appear less meaningful, reducing their sense of both autonomy and purpose. Finally, Randy Evans and Katherine Karl ask Is Helicopter Parenting Stifling Moral Courage and Promoting Moral Disengagement? Implications for the Training and Development of Millennial Managers? They find “helicopter parents” appear to have negatively influenced moral courage in their children. Given this holds also for many millennial managers, firms may struggle in developing ethical awareness with these two cohorts. They suggest more formal business ethics training for their workplace, to overcome this concern.