Imagine a discussion at a team meeting. A young employee left after six months. Another refused to answer messages in the evening. A third asks when their salary will be reviewed.
Someone already has an explanation ready: "That's Zoomers. They are all like that"
After such a phrase, one can discuss the characteristics of the generation for a long time—and still never find out why the first employee left, what was expected of the second, and what was promised to the third.
How reliable is the idea overall that a person's attitude toward work can be explained by their birth year?
Daniel Ravid, David Costanza, and Madison Romero gathered data from 143 independent samples—over 158 thousand participants. Their meta-analysis was published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2025. The authors studied job satisfaction, engagement, organizational commitment, work values, and other indicators.
They found few systematic, meaningfully significant differences between generations. In individual comparisons, differences did exist. But the results did not provide a convincing picture from which a simple instruction like "this generation is managed like this" could be derived.
There is also a more fundamental difficulty. When we compare a twenty-three-year-old specialist with a forty-three-year-old manager, age, career stage, experience, and possibly working conditions differ simultaneously. Labeling the discovered difference as "generational" does not yet mean establishing its cause.
Another question is whether attitudes toward work change over time among people of different ages. If work gradually occupies a less central place in society's life, it is easy to attribute this change to those who are just entering the labor market.
Sociologist Martin Schröder tested these explanations on data from 584,217 respondents across 113 countries from 1981–2022. In his model, after accounting for age and historical period, the year of birth added almost no explanation for the importance of work to an individual. The study was published in the Journal of Business and Psychology in 2024.
This is a solid reason to be more cautious with generational explanations. However, stating that science has definitively proved all generations are identical would also be a mistake.
The meta-analysis by Ravid and colleagues predominantly compares older generations. In Schröder's study, 3,210 respondents belonged to Gen Z, defined in that work as those born from 2000 onward; at the time of the latest observations, they were no older than 22 years old. Their subsequent working lives had not yet been observed. In addition, separating age, period, and generation requires statistical assumptions. Questions about the importance of work do not measure actual productivity.
Therefore, the practical conclusion is much more modest than the loud debates about youth: a generational label is a weak basis for making a decision about a specific employee.
Let us consider a hypothetical example. In a company, young employees quit more frequently in their first year. One could explain this by the generation's disloyalty. Or one could check whether they are concentrated in entry-level positions with lower pay, inconvenient schedules, or uncertain prospects. Perhaps the difference is tied to a single department or manager. Perhaps the reasons are completely different.
For now, these are just theories. But they can be cross-referenced with HR data and conversations with people. The phrasing "Zoomers are like that" says almost nothing about what exactly the company should change and how to measure the outcome.
For HR, it is more useful to start with specific questions. Who is leaving—all young employees or predominantly newcomers in specific roles? What is happening with people of a different age under similar conditions? Which expectations failed to match reality?
For companies in Uzbekistan, another caveat is also important: the usual generational boundaries cannot be automatically transferred from foreign literature to the local market. A shared birth year alone does not confirm an identical life experience. Foreign results provide a reason to ask questions, but the answers about one's own employees will have to be found here.