Looking for a Fulcrum- Are Preferred Work Values Different for Four Generation Cohorts Co-existing  in the Labour Market of Poland?

Individual’s work values define his/her career purposefulness. Individual’s chosen work values allow foreseeing what activity context and career model is important for him/her, seeking to successfully realize oneself in professional activity. Planning his/her professional career an individual is searching for the activity sphere, which could conform not only to his/her personal features, but also to his/her value orientations. Work values important for the individual allow realizing if they form conditions for planning modern career (successfully solve constantly changing activity problems and to correspond to always new raised requirements for a person in the organisation or in labour market), the realisation of which in today’s constantly changing labour market and social context becomes more and more problematic. Empiric research was carried out seeking to discover the work (activity) value structure. The research instrument was created by the authors of the research. Two hundred sixty five first-year students from three Lithuanian universities participated in the research. These are the main higher education institutions, preparing teachers in Lithuania. The obtained results show that work value structure of the first year students studying in social and humanitarian science programmes can be expressed by 6 main factors: responsible activity values, active work values, harmony values, reward values, activity style values, and social status values. Also, the main differences were ascertained between female and male work value structure. Responsible activity values, active work values and harmony values were much more important for female than male students.

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Ageing towards meaningful work? Age, labour-market change, and attitudes to work in the Swedish workforce, 1979–2003

Nordic Journal of Social Research ◽

10.7577/njsr.2079 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

Author(s):

Johan Örestig

Keyword(s):

Labour Market ◽

Age Differences ◽

Older Workers ◽

Generational Differences ◽

Work Values ◽

Age Groups ◽

Meaningful Work ◽

Market Change ◽

Younger Workers ◽

Extrinsic Work Values

A central finding in earlier research on work orientation is that there are substantial age-differences regarding attitudes to work. Generally, more older workers describe their jobs as intrinsically meaningful than younger workers. This result has been interpreted in three different ways, the psychological, the cultural, and the structural hypotheses, where the first emphasizes cognitive age-differences, the second sees age-differences as outcomes of generational differences, and the third regards them as expressions of labour-market inequalities. These different approaches lead to quite different hypotheses regarding recent developments, but the relevant research is limited. Drawing on data from the Swedish survey of living conditions (ULF), this study has examined attitudinal change within the Swedish workforce during 1979–2003. Three sub-periods, 1986-1987, 1994-1996, and 2001-2003 were compared with 1979, the year of reference. The results showed that a consistently smaller share of the workforce held extrinsic work values in the subsequent periods, and that this applied to all age-groups. Further, the results did not support the assumption of broader cultural differences between generations. Rather, the results provide support for the structural hypothesis. Older workers held extrinsic work values to a lesser degree than younger workers regardless of period. Most strikingly, the gap between the youngest group on the labour market (ages 16–29) and the older groups widened during the period. Furthermore, class differences in the distribution of the extrinsic attitude were intact throughout the study period; manual employees were consistently more likely to hold an extrinsic attitude than were service-class employees. This implies that differences in the probability of extrinsic work attitudes have been identifiable regardless of period, but that their prevalence has decreased as jobs involving features related to extrinsic work values have decreased since 1979.

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Young people’s attitudes and values

Youth Employment ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781447350347.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 13-58

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Labour Market ◽

Generational Differences ◽

Work Values ◽

Or Education ◽

Precarious Employment ◽

Temporary Contract ◽

Youth Attitudes ◽

People’S Attitudes ◽

The Unemployed

This chapter discusses the attitudes and aspirations of young people themselves. First, it considers whether being employed, being jobless, or having a temporary contract affect young people's attitudes to trust and trustworthiness Those who have managed to find good jobs, along with those who choose not to participate in the labour market or education, are more trusting than students, while the unemployed and above all those who find themselves in precarious employment are the least trusting of all. Young people — whether employed or not — also showed strong signs of solidarity with those who did not have jobs. The chapter then assesses young people's work values, arguing that generational differences in attitudes to work are a myth. It also looks at emerging policy lessons from research on youth attitudes and values.

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