| The primary purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of employees within a housing and food services industry to determine if the four generations may be distinguished by their perceptions. The four generations included: Traditionalists born 1945 and earlier, age 57+; Baby Boomers born 1946–1964, age 38–56; Generation Xers born 1965–1980, age 22–37; and voting age Millennials born 1981–1984, age 18–21. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among variables for leader behavior, older employees and job satisfaction.; The Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire was used to measure managers' perception of themselves as a group and employees' perception of managers as a group, the Survey of Company Policies Towards Older Workers to measure perceptions of older employees, and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire to measure job satisfaction. Two pilot studies were conducted prior to the main study to revise vernacular and authenticate phrasing.; Forty-seven managers and 394 employees completed questionnaires for the main study; data was analyzed using SPSS to address eighteen non-directional research hypotheses. Statistical analyses of data included nonparametric 2-tailed measures for ordinal level data such as median, which put the overall item median in the context of the response scale, Kruskal-Wallis to determine significant differences and Spearman rho for relationship testing. Examination of ratio-level data included a t test, which validated the sample and population. The minimum level of significance required for the rejection of the null hypotheses was set at .05.; Findings of this study indicated significant differences existed among age groups regarding perceptions of older employee work ethics, problems solving, trainability, maturity, leadership, flexibility, productivity, combined older employee variables, intrinsic satisfaction, and among managers and employees for combined leader behavior variables. On the other hand, no significant differences existed among age groups for structuring the work, consideration, overall leader behavior variables, extrinsic satisfaction, overall job satisfaction variables, and paired data from full-time employees for the population and sample. For relationships among variables, correlations were significant; rank-order correlation was modest for leader behavior and job satisfaction variables, and low for leader behavior and older employees variables. |
