GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN THE EFFECTS OF INSECURITY, RESTRUCTURED WORKPLACE TEMPORALITIES, AND TECHNOLOGY ON ORGANIZATIONAL LOYALTY

Abstract

We test hypotheses regarding generational differences in the effects on organizational loyalty of workplace insecurity, restructured workplace temporalities, and technological access to the workplace. We argue that large-scale social changes have eroded the social employment contract and impacted these features of the workplace. Further, these new working conditions will have a greater impact on the organizational loyalty and commitment of older cohorts of workers whose expectations were formed under the previous social contract than on more recent cohorts. With the exception of insecurity, our results generally support our hypotheses. They also have some intriguing implications that the conditions that dampen the loyalty of older cohorts enhance that of younger. Likewise, they raise important questions about what factors affect the loyalty of younger generations of workers and what role the increasing reliance on technology for work outside of “normal” working hours might play in fostering loyal employees.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 100th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We are grateful to Melvin Kohn and the anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this article. The authors remain responsible for the contents.

Notes

¹The “current” economy emerged out of the post–World War II economic restructuring that began sometime in the 1970s when the “labor-capital accord” unraveled. During the late 1970s through 1990s the shape of this new economy came into focus; the arguments we make examine directly some of the characteristics of the “new” economy. We do not focus on, for example, globalization per se, but do focus on attributes of economic and workplace life that are linked to globalization and that facilitate the new 24/7 economy.

²While much is made of the psychological contract (see, for example, research by Rousseau 1995) we argue that these generalized expectations exist at the social and cohort level. Though psychological and social contracts are inextricably intertwined, our focus is not on the individual experience. Despite organizational commitment being an individual level phenomenon, we're interested in how a social factor affects the overall experience of a cohort. We focus in particular on white collar workers in the knowledge and service occupations and industries because it is for these workers that exploring the implicit social contract is most relevant. Other work has focused on the more explicit social contract with blue collar workers (often referred to as the “labor-capital accord”). That [post–World War II] social contract was more explicit and embodied in union work rules, the welfare state and associated expectations, even among nonunionized workers, of certain standards of employment. Many nonunion workers benefited from these as their employers provided similar employment structures in order to forestall unionization. The research here focuses on the implicit social contracts relevant to the white-collar, professional, technical and service workers that dominate the most rapidly growing sectors of the contemporary economy (at least until the recession of 2007–2009).

³Prior to 2009, 2002 was the worst economic downturn since the 1980s so the arguments we are making about economic instability and time pressures in the “contemporary economy” are also relevant for the years in which these data are collected. Moreover, all of these arguments are relevant to the “new economy” that emerged sometime in the 1970s, see note 1.

⁴An Associated Press article (Irvine, “Workers push bosses to widen web access.” The Charlotte Observer, July 13, 2009, p. 5a that ran in a number of other papers as well) cites sociologist Barry Wellman's observations in which he makes exactly this point. The second author's informal survey of undergraduate and graduate students reveals identical sentiments. Systematic exploration of the distribution of characteristics, preferences and attitudes about work by generational cohort is beyond the scope of this article.

⁵We recognize that struggles over “speed-ups” often occurred for blue collar employees. White collar technical, professional, managerial and administrative employees on whom we focus in this study did not expect the same sorts of overload; see Maume and Purcell, 2007.

⁶For an extensive treatment of this topic, see the multidisciplinary edited collection, Workplace Temporalities: Volume 17 of Research in the Sociology of Work (Rubin 2007) as well as the special issues, published in 2001 of Work and Occupations, American Behavioral Scientist, Academy of Management Journal, and the Academy of Management Review, and Fuchs-Epstein and Kalleberg (eds.) (2004) Fighting for Time.

⁷“Loyalty towards the employer” might invoke for some people a bond between individuals, for others a larger company, a single organization, or a division with an organization. So in our language we are minimizing the use of “organizational commitment” as a more global concept and for the most part adhering to notions of “loyalty.” We would also argue, though, that “loyalty to ones' employer,” even if to a more micro actor, spills over to larger loyalty to the employing organization.

⁸The popular press further differentiates. For example, Generation Y is roughly those born between 1982 and 1994.

*p < .10; **p < .05; ***p < .01.

*p < .05; **p < .01.

Note. One-tailed test for major independent variables; two-tailed test for controls.

*p < .10; **p < .05; ***p < .01.