One of the most difficult aspects of business management today is How to Reduce Conflict in the Workplace. Sociologists study how people behave with one another, and one of the best business sociologists I’ve found is Dr. Morris Massey. Before he retired, his goal was to help owners, managers, and employees understand one another better so to increase team-building and productivity. His method was through understanding why people born in various time periods think differently from one another.
Back in the 1970s, Dr. Massey postulated that humans imprint attitudes about their perception of reality before they are seven years old based on what’s going on in the world at the time. Those attitudes carry forward with them throughout their lives. If you think about what has gone on in the world in 10-year increments starting around the turn of the last century, you can see that the world has changed enormously from one decade to the next.
Events in one decade would have affected one person differently than another person who was young in a decade when other events were occurring. Dr. Massey offers a reasonable explanation of how this phenomenon, generally known as the generation gap, affects the thinking and interaction of people who were young in different decades and, therefore, experienced different events. He discusses how this gap affects productivity in the working environment.
For instance, you can see how World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic during the 1910s may have influenced many young children to embrace patriotism or the tendency to attempt to avoid germs.
Then, we experienced the lawlessness of the Roaring Twenties and prohibition. Children in the ’30s lived the fallout from the stock market crash and the Great Depression, fostering extreme conservatism, even hoarding. The ’40s changed in a big way through the advents of World War II, factories, and women in the workplace.
Then came the boom time of the ’50s due to supplying the war machine of Korea and the beginning of the Vietnam conflict. The inclusion of a television in every home and with the war televised every night, either the fighting or the protesting had a major effect on the children of the time. Between the ’60s and the ’80s, the divorce rate skyrocketed, negatively affecting these tender young persons in ways that are still being studied.
The ’80s brought more recession, the space shuttle, the space station, and a focus on technology. The ’90s solidified the technological revolution and brought on another stock market bubble and crash. The turn of the century put computers and cell phones in schools and every home, and the real estate recession forced many young families to move back in with parents.
Can you imagine how Grampa, who was born just before the Great Depression, might have considerably more austere attitudes toward money, food, and work as they interact with people who were born in the boom years of the fifties when all things were available to almost everyone? Likewise, how Gramma, who was brought up by a mother who stayed at home, might be at odds with a granddaughter who works in a law firm and whose husband takes care of the children?
For each person in the workplace to understand where others are coming from when there is conflict is to promote smoother relations among your employee base. I highly recommend buying Massey’s videos or borrowing them from the library – “What you are is Where you Were When …” videos 1 and 3. I have shown these videos to employees and management in restaurant private room settings over lunch or dinner since they are lengthy. The revelations offered can change the attitudes of many of your employees and management team. For information on reducing conflict between workers through proper organizational design, you might also want to look into my Profit Power Series.