Is Generational Diversity Good for Engagement? Generational Diversity\u27s Moderation of the Relationship Between An Employee\u27s Perception of Leadership Effectiveness and Their Own Engagement
This dissertation manuscript is rooted in the notion that an employee’s perception of their immediate supervisor’s leadership effectiveness, and the associated social exchange, are significant contributors to their engagement. Engagement, when consistently elevated, results in positive organizational outcomes. While perceived leadership effectiveness and engagement present a relatively intuitive connection, other less clearly defined factors might moderate this relationship. These factors include a myriad of supervisor and employee traits and behaviors, many of which represent levels and dimensions of diversity. Diversity, when misunderstood and subsequently over or underestimated, can result in unforeseen impact to organizational outcomes. One critical diversity construct is age diversity, also known as generational diversity, or the difference in generational belonging, identification and generational manifestations, between an employee and their supervisor. Generational diversity might challenge the assumption that diversity has a generally positive impact on the workplace, namely because of the severity in differences found between the values of working generations (James et al., 2011). This research is concerned with answering the following questions: How does generational diversity in the employee-supervisor hierarchy, affect the relationship between positive perceptions of leader effectiveness and employee engagement? Of particular interest, is whether generational diversity moderates this relationship? In an effort to avoid missing a critical engagement moderator, this study also explores employee personality as a moderator to this relationship
