Baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, Generation Z: at work, generational differences tend to be treated as self-evident. Yet what does the data actually show when it comes to personality?
Drawing on several decades of data from the Hogan inventories, Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp, co-hosts of the podcast The Science of Personality, examine the respective influence of age, era and generation on personality.
The finding is particularly instructive for executives, HR directors and talent management professionals: individual differences count for far more than generational ones.
Understanding that distinction makes it possible to move past age-related stereotypes, to sharpen recruitment and skills development strategies, and to build management practices that are more personal and more durable.
It is natural to wonder whether real differences in personality exist between generations. In everyday life, certain situations can easily be read as the consequence of a generational gap, not least between people who grew up in very different technological environments.
Another question arises too: does the generation that entered the labour market during the Covid-19 pandemic show specific personality characteristics?
To answer the recurring questions about how to hire candidates or motivate people according to their generation, Hogan's Data Science team ran an internal study on generational differences.
To understand the study's methodology, bear in mind that Hogan has been collecting personality data for several decades.
Age is often confused with generation, although the two are distinct factors. The Data Science team therefore studied three dimensions liable to influence assessment results:
Take someone who is 55 today and belongs to Generation X. They may have taken the Hogan inventories twenty years ago, when they were 35. Their results might then differ from those of people who are 55 or 35 today and take the same assessments now.
In order to analyse these millions of data points properly, Hogan's data scientists used an age-period-cohort analysis. This statistical method separates the effects tied to age, those associated with a given period and those belonging to the birth cohort, in other words the generation.
"The analysis is fairly simple, but the mathematics underpinning it are complex," Ryne Sherman explains.
The reality is that the data does not always bear out received ideas about generational differences. It would be tempting to think, for example, that adults in younger generations have more sexual partners. The data shows that this is not the case.[1]
In the same way, the data reveals that there are in fact very few generational differences in personality.
On average, age effects account for only a very small share of the personality differences observed: between 5% and 10%.
Effects tied to the historical period account for roughly 2% to 5%, while effects directly attributable to generation explain only around 1% to 2%.
Everything else corresponds to individual differences, independent of age, era or generation.
"That is the core of the individual, the part of yourself each person carries everywhere they go, and it explains most of the variability observed in our assessment scores," Ryne Sherman points out.
Hogan's data scientists analysed data from the three main inventories:
The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) describes the strengths expressed day to day.
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) identifies derailers, meaning the characteristics liable to become watch-outs or limitations, particularly under pressure.
The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI), finally, describes a person's values, drivers and unconscious biases.
Together, these assessments build a picture of an individual's observable behavioural tendencies from reputational data. They are therefore a valuable foundation for personality assessment, for developing leadership potential and for assessment and development work.
The environment a person lived through in early adulthood, whether a recession, an economic depression, a crisis or a pandemic, does not appear to produce a significant generational effect on personality.
That said, even though no major generational difference appears in personality inventory scores, some results do shift over time.
"A slight rise in scores on the HDS Skeptical scale has been observed since the HDS was created," Ryne Sherman reports.
The Skeptical scale measures, among other things, perceptiveness and insight. Overused or insufficiently regulated, these characteristics can show up as cynicism or mistrust.
Ryne Sherman attributes this slight shift in part to the decline in trust towards institutions observed in various regions of the world.
The rise in Skeptical scores may also be tied to the considerable quantity of information people are exposed to daily.
The study also found a rise in scores on the MVPI Hedonism scale over the past two decades.
The shift may stem from changing social attitudes towards the balance between working life and personal life.
Around the world, people may be more inclined to sign up to the idea of "work hard and enjoy life fully", a conception associated with the Hedonism scale. That scale measures a preference for working environments that encourage enjoyment, lightness and open-mindedness.
Effects tied to an era can thus shape how generational differences are perceived. Even though the rise in Hedonism concerns the whole population, some might be tempted to attribute the shift to younger generations alone.
Personality is extremely stable. Some research even shows that personality characteristics observed in primary school can predict certain aspects of adult personality forty years later.[2]
The data nonetheless shows predictable changes in personality with age.
Older people score lower on average across many HDS scales. This shift is probably a sign of maturity.
Of more experienced workers, Ryne Sherman explains:
"You start finding different ways of handling problems. Situations you once thought were hugely important turn out not to matter so much after all. It comes quite simply from experience."
The HPI and MVPI scales show comparable curvilinear effects: some scores rise with age while others decline over time.
These findings show how far skills and leadership development has to be approached dynamically, taking account of experience and of the various stages of a career.
Age effects are considerably larger than generational ones.
Put another way, a person's age is more likely to shape their personality than the generation they belong to.
So if personality data from a baby boomer and from a member of Generation Z is collected at the same age, it will show little or no difference directly attributable to their generation, even though several decades separate the periods in which that data was collected.
"In this hypothetical world, 21-year-olds look like 21-year-olds, 40-year-olds look like 40-year-olds, and 60-year-olds look like 60-year-olds. It is simply part of the maturation process," Ryne Sherman explains.
When someone takes the Hogan personality inventories, their results are compared with a global norm, meaning a body of data collected from working adults across the world.
Diverse by design, the sample mirrors the working population worldwide.
As much as 53% of that sample is made up of people under 40, while around 47% are 40 or over.
Hogan's data indicates that, on average, people early in their careers tend to be slightly more emotional, bolder, more adventurous and more inclined to take risks.
These personality characteristics can be genuine strengths for someone with less professional experience.
In someone further along in their career, the same characteristics might instead be read as a lack of maturity or responsibility.
It makes sense, then, that people adapt their behaviour as their roles and responsibilities change over the course of a career.
Hogan Assessments data gives a clear answer to the question of generational differences in personality.
"The data covers millions of cases. In reality, there are no generational differences," Ryne Sherman states.
What people are looking for is not determined by belonging to a particular generation. Age exerts a slight influence at most.
Adults arriving in the labour market today share certain characteristics with baby boomers when they themselves were starting out.
To understand how to attract and hire the generations entering working life now, it can help to recall the aspirations any of us might have had at the start of our own career: looking for stability, for instance, while having opportunities to develop.
But neither generation nor age is the determining factor in personality.
Most of what makes up personality comes from individual differences.
At work as in everyday life, treating people as individuals rather than as representatives of a generation is therefore the most useful approach.
"Ignore the generation. Ignore the age," Ryne Sherman concludes. "For me, it all comes down to that attention paid to the individual."
The conclusion matters particularly for HR strategy and talent management. Basing hiring, development or leadership decisions on generational stereotypes risks obscuring what genuinely sets each person apart: their personality, their motives, their values, their strengths and their watch-out areas.
A personality assessment approach, by contrast, makes management, coaching and support practices more individual, while encouraging team transformation built on data rather than on assumptions.
Generational differences may be visible in habits, cultural references or attitudes to technology. But where personality is concerned, their influence turns out to be extremely limited.
For organisations, the real opportunity therefore lies in moving past generational categories to make better sense of individual differences.
Personality assessment can play a strategic part in that work. It helps executives and talent management professionals identify leadership potential, personalise skills development and build working environments suited to each person's drivers and behaviour.
This approach encourages more sustainable management, better collective performance and an organisational culture in which people can develop according to who they actually are, rather than what their year of birth is supposed to say about them.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Are Generations Really That Different?
