Different ages, different viewpoints

March 2008 | By Cristina Simon, Professor of HR Management at IE Business School.

Much has been said about cultural, religious or sexual diversity, but there has been little talk of how to balance different generations that have different ways of seeing the world and business.

The enterprise world is starting to take notice of new aspects that form part of employees´ personalities and that will most probably affect their effective management. Although the recognition of the differences among genders, races or cultures has been consolidated in many companies, one of the things that greatly determine the way we see the world in this sense is the experiences we have had and share with the people from our own age group.

Besides our private and personal experiences, we all remember milestones that have marked the different stages of our life and that often serve as common references among our contemporaries. These experiences are shared by a large social group within a certain age range and we refer to this group as a generation. The important part of determining a generation group is not so much the fact of belonging to a certain age group (there may be considerable variations), but rather the cohesion of the group as a result of experiences, values and a shared way of life.