Young people no longer want to work. Or is it that they study less because they are working too much? That is also possible. Or perhaps they are simply taking better care of themselves and their work-life balance. Or perhaps not. Many clichés circulate about these themes, but what do the hard data say? I recently dove back into my archive of studies (the count stands at 422) that I once forgot to blog about. This study on generational differences in the workplace turned out to be far too interesting to leave there.

In a study published in the Journal of Business and Psychology, Martin Schröder used data from 584,217 people in 113 countries collected between 1981 and 2022. That alone makes this one of the largest studies into generational differences in work attitudes that I know of. In other words: what a dataset.

The central question sounds simple: do generational differences actually exist? That might seem like a strange question to some, unless you have been following my work for a while. After all, you often read claims about baby boomers being different from Generation X, which is different from millennials, who in turn differ from Generation Z. But anyone who reflects on this a little longer encounters a fundamental problem.

Suppose that twenty-year-olds today attach less importance to work than fifty-year-olds. Is that because they belong to a different generation? Or simply because twenty-year-olds always view work differently from people in the middle of their careers? And if young people today answer differently from young people thirty years ago, is that because they were born in a different year? Or because society as a whole has changed in the meantime?

Researchers call this the age-period-cohort problem. Statistically, it is one of the most difficult problems in social science research. Age, year of birth, and the historical period in which people are surveyed are inevitably interconnected. Those who fail to separate these three risk wrongly labelling age effects or societal changes as generational differences. Many popular stories about generations are built on exactly that mistake.

And that is precisely what Schröder tried to avoid in this study. When he looked at the year of birth, the familiar story seemed to hold true. Younger generations do indeed appear to consider work less important than older generations. But as soon as he took age and the historical period in which people were surveyed into account, those generational differences disappeared almost completely.

So what remained?

First, age proved to be a much stronger explanation. Work becomes more important to most people as they get older. This attachment to work subsequently peaks around middle age, only to decline again towards retirement. This pattern appears to be many times stronger than the differences between birth cohorts.

In addition, Schröder also found a period effect. Over the past decades, work has gradually become somewhat less important for everyone. Not only for Generation Z, but for all ages. It is primarily the zeitgeist that is changing, for everyone, young and old. In reality, society as a whole appears to be slowly shifting in the same direction.

I confess that I had not expected this result myself, but the more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. Young people can now answer an older person complaining that they want to work less than before with a simple reply: so do you.

It is also interesting that Schröder did not look solely at the importance of work. He investigated ten other work-related attitudes, such as the importance of being able to take initiative, having interesting tasks, vacation days, or pleasant colleagues. Here, too, most perceived generational differences disappeared once age and historical period were taken into account.

Does this mean that generations do not exist? No, Schröder does not go that far. He refers to the classical sociologist Karl Mannheim, who argued that exceptional historical events can permanently shape a generation. Think of a world war, the attacks of 9/11, COVID, or another event that leaves a lasting mark on people’s lives. But that is something very different from proclaiming a new generation every ten or fifteen years with its own character and accompanying clichés.

So when someone says that “Generation Z no longer wants to work”, the first question is not whether that is true. The first question should be whether we are actually talking about a generation at all.

Perhaps we are simply talking about young people, or perhaps about a society that is slowly changing.

Maybe what matters most is simply being twenty.