| The United States workforce consists of a diverse group of workers with generational differences. This multigenerational workforce represents a variety of skills and knowledge as well as attitudes, values, motivations, and beliefs. Such diversity can affect the level of respect, communication, and interaction among employees and thereby influence both organizational and individual performance. Leading the generational cohorts in the workplace so that there is productivity as well as harmony and respect for each other is becoming more complex since each generation has a different set of values. The problem to be addressed is the low employee satisfaction ratings in federal agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that can possibly be attributed to leadership style and may hamper the ability to attract and retain future generations of civil servants. This quantitative study investigated whether perceived differences of a leader's effectiveness, organizational productivity, and employee satisfaction exist among the non-managerial Millennial generation of federal employees whose managers practice transformational, transactional, or passive-avoidant leadership styles. The MLQ 5X-Short was completed by non-managerial Millennial employees in the Technical Operations Service of the FAA. The results of the study indicate that perceptions of leadership effectiveness, organizational productivity, and employee satisfaction were different based on the different leadership types (transformational, transactional, and passive-avoidant). Specifically, the results show that transformational and transactional leaders were rated the highest on leadership effectiveness, organizational productivity, and employee satisfaction. Passive-avoidant leaders were rated the lowest. This study is consistent with previous literature regarding the transformational leadership style having a greater impact on leadership effectiveness, organizational productivity, and employee satisfaction. However, this study also demonstrates that according to the Millennial generation, the traditional transactional leadership style can also produce positive leadership outcomes in the federal government. These findings contribute to the transformational-transactional leadership theory by providing additional research on the generational diversity of leadership styles. |
