Predicting Employee Performance: An Intergenerational Approach

Introduction

For many years, business sustainability was linked to the company’s economic performance. In other words, it involved satisfying shareholders’ interests. The perspective switched from shareholders to stakeholders due to Dodd (1932) who started an academic debate regarding the legality of using the company’s profit for the public interest. Against this backdrop, Friedman (1970) argued that business sustainability depends not only on shareholders’ satisfaction but also on the satisfaction of the internal and external stakeholders. As a consequence, managers started to focus on: (i) rationally exploiting the resources (Kollmus & Agyeman, 2002); (ii) increasing stakeholders’ awareness to social and environmental issues (Finksel, 2006); (iii) investing in the development of an open organizational culture (Kollmus & Agyeman, 2002); (iv) encouraging employees’ development and empowerment (Lozano, 2008); and (v) developing activities that encourage knowledge sharing among employees and, improve their capacity of making decisions (Leon, 2018). Thus, the importance of human resources increased since they were the only ones capable of transforming all the other organizational resources and enhancing the achievement of competitive advantage. Furthermore, in the current aging society, human resources become a “critical asset” (Blome, Borell, Hakansson, & Nilsson, 2020; Kollmann, Stoeckmann, Kensbock, & Peschl, 2020; Leinonen, Chandola, Laaksonen, & Martikainen, 2020) due to their skills, abilities, ideas, thoughts, and experiences, generally labeled as “tacit knowledge” (Letmathe, & Rossler, 2019; Upadhyay & Kundu, 2019).

Within this framework, the company’s performance became a reflection of employees’ performance. Therefore, the concept of job performance captured the attention of various scholars and, according to Hosie and Nankervis (2016), it is the most important criterion in occupational, industrial and organizational psychology and human resources management. Despite this, there is still no common framework for considering the underlying performance dimension requirements of jobs (Hossie & Nankervis, 2016) and the intergenerational approach of this issue is missing although at least five generations are currently working together, and each of them has its own value system and its own definition for performance. Thus, Baby Boomers value teamwork and have a psychological need for group acceptance (Dwyer & Azevedo, 2016; Galo, 2011) while Generation X and Generation Y are individualistic, optimistic and goal-oriented (Baily, 2009; Dwyer & Azevedo, 2016; Kaminska & Borzillo, 2017; Rupčic, 2018). As a consequence, the former are more vulnerable to counterproductive behavior while the latter use it as a challenge to improve their task performance and also the individual and organizational contextual performance.

Taking these into account, this chapter aims to perform an intergenerational analysis regarding the impact of counterproductive behavior and contextual performance on employees’ task performance. As it is presented further, these variables are interlinked and influenced by the characteristics of each generation. Thus, the following section emphasizes the types of generations that are currently recognized in the labor market and the relationships established among the dimensions of job performance while section three sheds light on the methodological approach that has been followed in order to achieve the research goal. Further, the perspective from which the concept of job performance is approached by the members of Generation X, Y, and Z who work in the banking system is presented and last but not least, the article closes by drawing several conclusions and emphasizing further research directions.