Managing Millennials in the African Workplace: What the Millennials Need

Abstract

There is an increasing interest amongst management researchers and professionals on the organisational implications of the generational shift that is heralded by the introduction of millennials into the workplaces (Emylee Anderson, Aaron A. Buchko, Kathleen J. Buchko, 2016). Millennials have been recognised as representing one of the five generational groups found in today’s workplace. Researchers have categorised the Millennials as shaped by common historical events, experiences, location and given period of time (Gilleard, 2004). This suggests that the environment within which these Millennials grew up during their formation years impact their values, attitudes, and behaviours. The need to assess personalised models suitable for effectively understanding and managing millennials propels the objective of this study, with the aim of attaining increased productivity gains, mutually for the millennials, their managers and organisation at large. To achieve this, therefore, the current study employed the simple random survey technique to draw data from a range of students and participants at Lagos Business School, Nigeria. The current study contributes to aiding managers with empirical evidence required for understanding millennials, using the context of responses generated from a combination of millennials themselves and their managers at work. In all, the study identifies that millennials have peculiar characteristics and needs in the workplace and recommends that older managers should adopt personalised model interventions to keep them motivated.