Work values of employees across multigenerational workforce in hospitality industry in Thailand

Abstract

A mixture of age diversity in workplace had been witnessed, yet an understanding of the association between multigenerational workforce and their work values was little known. As a result, many firms reported that the domestic conflicts were most likely to be due to the lack of generational understandability and appropriate HR policy in response to such a context. This study therefore aimed to: (1) examine the differences in work values across the generations of employees; (2) explore whether the demographic factors and parenthood status were associated with the work values of employees; (3) provide the policy suggestions/discussions on human resource interventions aligning with the work values of multigenerational workforce. This research applied a quantitative approach to investigate the relationship between generations and work values intertwining with demographic data. There were 2 generation cohorts, generation X and generation Y in this study while the employees of the hospitality-related industry were selectively focused. The data in this study were collected through the online survey. The total respondents were 242 and this gave the response rate of 87.2 %. After removing the incomplete responses, there were 211 observations for the data and regression analysis.

Three dimensions of work values in this study included intrinsic work values, extrinsic work values, and work centricity. It was found that the intrinsic work value had an association with the education level since the employees with educational background of a master’s degree or higher were likely to have work context in which the meaningfulness of work can be created more than those with educational background of a bachelor’s degree. Extrinsic value of work was the only dimension that could not statistically be concluded due to the limitation of the model and survey design of this part. Work centricity value had an association with generation and parenthood status. In particular, gen X employees were likely to be loyal to their career whereas gen Y employees tended to consider to leave their career in an easier manner. Further, the employees who had child(ren) were likely to focus on work more than those without child(ren). Hence, the HR professionals are required to design the intervention in which understandability of work values across different generations was addressed. The corporate culture & value(s) were as significant as learning & development since they also facilitated the way the people learn and develop. To measure how the people were practically applying the knowledge into behavioural level, the performance management system should be aligned with the learning intervention where the values equipped accordingly. Moreover, HR intervention where the solid career ladder and/or succession planning to critical position should be required to retain and attract talented employees in the labour force, especially those who are in higher education level since they would be willing to contribute in the career. Also, the compensation package to cover the child(ren) of the employees in the workforce should be designed in order to have such parental employees retained in the firm.