Leadership is the ability to lead people through a process of influencing them to achieve specific goals. There is no leadership without followers, as there are no followers without a leader. Followers are simply some aggregate of people without a leader. All members of the group must interact with each other on the way to a common goal. With this interaction, the leader stands out. The members of the group and its status decisively influence the character of leadership, leaders, and the stability of their situation.
There are essential generational differences that leaders should take into consideration for conducting effective leadership and goal achievement. The generational differences create a huge generation gap under the influence of people’s behaviors and situation perception. The leadership strategy should be based on various generational value systems to solve the problem of this generation management. The value structure of every generation helps to identify a group’s characteristics that can be used for the management of a definite group.
For conducting successful leadership, the needs of each generation as a member of a team should be understood. People between 18 – 35 years of age, in comparison with people over the age of 40 are free choice-oriented, appreciating independence and equality of rights. They are ambitious and broad-minded. This group is characterized as hard-working and promotion-oriented. They pretend to belong to managers of a middle level, not taking into account the lack of necessary experience, while people over 40 years old need experience for getting a further promotion (Lyons, Schweitzer, & Ng, 2015). These groups of people are a family-oriented and value-free time for private life. They prefer working in groups, where they can show competent and effective work. They logically consider the tasks and can make rational decisions. The leader of a cross-generational group should consider a number of the group differences (Al-Asfour & Lettau, 2014). The leadership strategy of such groups must be based on generation values for narrowing age gaps in a given group.
References
Al-Asfour, A., & Lettau, L. (2014). Strategies for leadership styles for multi-generational workforce. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 11(2), 58-69.
Lyons, S. T., Schweitzer, L., & Ng, E. S. (2015). How have careers changed? An investigation of changing career patterns across four generations. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 30(1), 8-21.