Retiring the Generation Gap: How Employees Young and Old Can Find Common Ground

Research

We looked for answers to these questions in the comments about

political behavior at work that were volunteered in response to the

questions about career challenges, retention, and generational

conflict, and in response to specific questions we asked about how

people get ahead at work.

How important do you think internal politics is in your work-

place? According to the people of all generations who filled out

the survey, internal politics is one of the major issues that—believe

it or not—actually interferes with getting their job done. For ex-

ample, people wrote about how dealing with a bad boss, peer jeal-

ousy, political sabotage, managing older bosses, being the youngest

one on an executive team, having political battles for resources,

not being skilled politically, and not getting recognition for good

work reduced their productivity significantly, causing them to get

much less done for the good of the organization than they could.

They also commented that sometimes the amount of “politicking”

made them less energized to get anything done at all. In essence

they said that politics made work much less interesting and much

less fun, which caused them to do less and to want to do less.

Learning How to Be Political

Early Xers talked about needing to learn how to be more politically

aware and savvy. They talked about how they thought it was a skill

set they didn’t have and one that they felt was important to learn.

They understood the importance of political skills for doing well in

an organization, although they obviously weren’t happy about its

appearing to be more important than doing the work well.

Politics seems to be the primary driver for promotion (who you

know with a vote) rather than one’s performance record.

—Early Xer

Politics Causing Bad Business Decisions

Another political issue that both Boomers and Xers talked about

as having a significantly negative effect on getting their job done

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was that of political considerations getting in the way of what is best

for the business. They said they thought it was bad for their orga-

nization when people were promoted because they were more po-

litically suave, but it was even worse when decisions were made for

political reasons that were obviously bad for business. They said it

was obvious that some of the time people are thinking more about

the political implications of a specific decision than about the busi-

ness implications. The respondents understood that the political

implications of decisions were important, but they thought it was

bad business to pay less attention to the business implications of

politically driven decisions.

This was especially of concern when it came to questions of re-

source allocation. People of all generations talked about how they

saw resources being allocated as much because of political ma-

neuvering as because of actual need. Some talked about how it an-

gered and disgusted them that more thought wasn’t being put into

allocating resources according to what would make the business

more productive rather than according to who had the most po-

litical acumen.

Trying to balance corporate politics with

what’s right for the business objectives.

—Early Xer, writing about one of her largest career challenges

Conflict—But Not About Politics

Contradicting the stereotype, only seven people talked about corpo-

rate politics as being a major point of conflict between generations—

and people from all generations were represented in those seven

responses. That is, a few people see differences between the gen-

erations with regard to organizational politics, but very few thought

it was a critical issue.

Politics—Reality of Organizational Life

Aside from how they felt about organizational politics and its ef-

fects, many respondents—respondents of all generations—seemed

to be resigned to the reality that organizational politics was a cen-

tral part of the work that could neither be avoided nor eliminated.

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