Impact of Generation Gap on Work Engagement: Evidence from Gen X and Gen Y Employees of a Leading Commercial Bank Located in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Work engagement is an important factor that has a significant impact on employee motivation, commitment, the quality of their work, and overall performance. The best strategy for engaging employees from various generational groups (Generation X and Generation Y) must be determined by the organizations. As a result, this study was carried out to look at the connection between the generation gap and the level of work engagement among banking employees at ABC bank in Sri Lanka. At present, only two generations, Generation X and Generation Y are working within the organization’s workforce. Therefore, only these two generations used to conduct this study. The information was gathered from a randomly chosen sample of Colombo district banking staff members who work for ABC Commercial Bank in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As well as administering a standardized questionnaire with 24 items and a Likert scale with seven points. Data collection was done using the survey approach. The SPSS 23.0 version was used to analyze the data using an independent sample t-test and mean comparison to generate the results. According to the results of the study, identify there is significant impact on work engagement. Which means significant difference between work engagements of two groups. The generation X (1965-1980) employees had the highest work engagement and generation Y (1981-2000) employees presented a lower work engagement than to generation X. As well as Generation X most prominent dimension is absorption and Generation Y most prominent dimensions is dedication. Based on the above results, it can be recommended that the organization creates policies and procedures to increase the work engagement of different generations in order to obtain strongest productivity out of its workforce.