Organizational commitment: An examination of three generations of aerospace manufacturing employees

Since the beginning of this millennium, the generational make-up of organizational workforces has become more diverse in both age and category. Each brings its own widely publicized and sometimes criticized perceptions of perspective, values, motivation, attitudes, and beliefs to the workplace. In today's working environment, organizational commitment has become one of those highly debated perceptions and creates havoc for organizations searching to resolve those generational differences. This purpose of this non-experimental quantitative study was to investigate Affective, Normative, and Continuance commitment differences within three generations of aerospace manufacturing workers. An existing company-owned secondary database that contained Organizational Commitment Survey results issued in 2013 to approximately 1,000 employees was the instrument used for the study. There were 340 respondents, however after data clean-up 27 responses were omitted due to low Traditionalist cohort participation and multiple responses being provided to some questions. One-way ANOVA's and MANOVA were used to determine generational commitment levels. With the assigned significance level set at p≤ 0.05, the results found no statistically significant differences in Affective, Normative, and Continuance commitment differences among or within the Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Millennial cohorts. The implications of this study suggest there is no evidence to support differences in Affective, Normative, and Continuance commitment levels based on age. The perceived differences in organizational commitment within generations may be overemphasized. Future research should be performed in other aerospace manufacturing regions as well as other industries (both union and non-union) to further investigate generational commitment from various perspectives.