Leadership Concept Differences Across Generations in the Hong Kong Workforce: A Mixed-Method Study

Substantial practitioner and consulting literature has emerged in the past decades to describe and explain the intergenerational workforce issues, in particular the Millennial Generation or Gen Y phenomenon. Yet, most academic research positing the Millennial Generation as a unique class of workforce that possesses distinctive expectations and behaviors has yielded mixed and inconclusive results so far (Costanza, Badger, Fraser, Severt, & Gade, 2012; E. Parry & Urwin, 2011). Based on implicit leadership theory (ILT), this research examined if different conceptions of leadership in the two generations in Hong Kong, namely the Pre-80s (those who were born before 1980) and the Post-80s (those who were born after 1981), exist. One of the key workforce conflicts identified in the literature is between managers (typically Pre-80s) and their subordinates (typically Post-80s). Building on this hypothesis, the study further posited that the gaps in leadership conceptions across different generations can negatively impact the leader-member relationship and, in turn, negatively impact the job satisfaction and organization commitment across generations, resulting in workforce conflicts between leaders and followers. This research used mixed methods to inquire qualitatively and quantitatively on this research problem. Both the quantitative and qualitative results did not provide support that the two generations have significantly different leadership concepts. The quantitative analysis result, with the support of consistent qualitative analysis results of this study, essentially validates the result from the work of Epitropaki and Martin (2005; i.e., the prototypic ILT difference between the leadership concept and the recognized leadership of reporting leader casts negative impact to the leader- follower relationship and, in turn, impacts workplace attitude like organizational commitment and job satisfaction). The qualitative analysis shows that the negative perceptions on one generation from the other generation were quite evidenced. These negative perceptions (versus intrinsic differences) could be a key factor that causes intergenerational conflict in the organizations.