Abstract
The impact of COVID-19 on multigenerational organizations is evolving, and work-life dynamics are transforming rapidly. Due to immense generational shifts, organizations are finding the need to enable the transfer of leadership to younger people in the post-pandemic workforce in record numbers. Currently, an estimated 10,000 “Baby Boomers” are retiring from the workforce daily. This calamity makes the Millennials and Generation Z-ers the largest generations in history. Hence, this means these two generations will potentially constitute more than half of the eligible voters in the USA by 2036. Thereby, it behooves human resources management (HRM) practitioners, scholars, and leaders to build a deeper understanding of changing intergenerational models based on the voices, perspectives, and practices that impact enhancements of employee engagement and productivity toward growing resilient, holistically intelligent future leaders. As Industry 5.0 emerges, resilient holistic leaders in healthy multigenerational organizations are instrumental in positively impacting the post-pandemic workplace.
TopIntroduction
Due to immense generational shifts, organizations need to enable the transfer of leadership to younger people in the post-pandemic world. An estimated 10,000 baby boomers are retiring from the workforce each day, making the Millennials and Generation Z-ers the largest generations in history, hence potentially becoming more than half of the eligible voters in the United States by the year 2036 (Bordas, 2023). Thereby, it behooves human resources management (HRM) practitioners to build a deeper understanding of changing intergenerational models based on the voices, perspectives, and practices that impact enhancements of employee engagement and productivity toward growing holistically intelligent future leaders (Vázquez de Príncipe, 2021a).
The COVID-19 crisis critically exposed and exponentially accelerated global organizations' leadership pipeline gaps, impacting the post-pandemic HRM discipline (Sharma & Kumar, 2022; Sivanandam & Kumar, 2020). This dilemma creates a hastened sense of urgency for organizations to generate new structured approaches for succession capacity building for a new Leadership 4.0 Pipeline for the next generation of resilient leaders (Oberer & Erkollar, 2018). Evolving needs have the potential for instilling leadership paradigm shifts towards integrating a combination of new dexterous mindsets and behaviors, digital knowledge sharing, and interpersonal skills as critical components towards leading high-performance teams in the digital era within hybrid workplaces (Gallup, 2023; Vázquez de Príncipe, 2022). There is a propensity for the organizations of tomorrow to be profoundly impacted by the Industry Revolution 4.0 pillars focus on business transformations related to generative artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things digitization, systems automation, and ChatGPT (Abramson, 2023; Fareri et al., 2020).
The future of work depends on intentionally aligning workplace culture interventions to facilitate the next generation of leaders’ growth within multicultural and multigenerational organizations by garnering appropriate mindsets, competencies, and behaviors to meet Industry 4.0 and emerging Industry 5.0 relational demands, which differentiates between the human spirit and AI (Abramson, 2023; Príncipe, 2023a). Nevertheless, it is possible to intentionally leverage AI to transform employee engagement by collecting data at scale while simultaneously establishing self-regulating measures to mitigate potential risks associated with improper or biased tool use (Vieweg, 2021). Additionally, providing the workforce with the freedom to express themselves regarding crucial business areas that directly impact their work constructs is essential. This strategically holistic agile tactic produces a positive organizational, cultural, and environmental ecosystem, whereby personnel feel efficacy deeply and are more connected to the business objectives, garnering better insights into the particular areas as individual contributors upon which they can improve (Príncipe, 2023b; Terblanche et al., 2022). Hence, research indicates that positive work-life dynamics can potentially increase employee engagement and productivity – benefiting individuals, teams, organizations, and communities.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Employee Engagement Metric: The performance accountability rating to understand how engaged the employees are by using annual engagement surveys, pulse surveys, or Employer Net Promoter Score (eNPS) leveraged as a human-centric metric within healthy holistic-minded organizations.
Holistic Resilient Mindedness: The ability to promptly adapt to emergent disruptions and the tendency to perceive such sudden change challenges as opportunities to grow themselves and others within their networks and communities is evident in the productive performance of consummate spiritually intelligent leaders.
Dynexity Effects: The two competing forces of dynamic internal and complex external business environments evolving the HRM discipline in the VUCA world are triggered by the constant changes in the workforce size, talent shortages, and organizational structure or process stakeholder demands.
Hygiene Factors: The emerging shifts in thriving HRM professionals who can engage successfully by establishing positive interpersonal relationships with supervisors, peers, subordinates, and the community to foster a positive culture that emphasizes a commitment to organizational ecosystem excellence.
HRM and Business Outcomes Holistic Integration Framework: The integrative conceptual framework comprised of continuous learning (growth mindset), human resourcing (resilient optimizing leaders), shaping working environment (holistic positive culture), shared understanding (two-way transparent communications), and performance accountability (human-centric metrics).
Employee Happiness Metric: The performance accountability rating to understand employees’ commitment to the organization and their roles using the eNPS, weekly pulse surveys, or employee job satisfaction index leveraged as a human-centric metric within healthy, holistic-minded organizations.