David Costanza

Who they are

Costanza's work on this site is a body of three papers, all on the same question: whether the generational categories used in workplaces describe anything real. This page records only what those papers say. It does not state his employer or career history, because the sources used for this site do not establish them.

The question is a practical one. Employers spend money on training, recruitment and management designed around the idea that Traditionals, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials hold different values. Costanza's papers ask whether the evidence supports that spending.

Key papers

Costanza, D. P., Badger, J. M., Fraser, R. L., Severt, J. B., & Gade, P. A. (2012). Generational differences in work-related attitudes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Business and Psychology, 27(4), 375-394. The paper identified twenty studies, with eighteen pairwise comparisons across four generations and 19,961 participants, and looked at job satisfaction, organisational commitment and intent to leave. Single comparisons ranged from 0.02 to 0.25 in standard deviations for satisfaction, from -0.22 to 0.46 for commitment and from -0.62 to 0.05 for intent to leave. The authors describe the relationships as modest to negligible, with many near zero, conclude that meaningful differences among generations probably do not exist on these variables, and suggest that interventions aimed at generational differences may not be effective.

Costanza, D. P., & Finkelstein, L. M. (2015). Generationally based differences in the workplace: Is there a there there? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 8(3), 308-323. A focal article that reports little solid empirical evidence for generationally based differences and little theory explaining why there should be any. It explores generational myths, reviews the risks of using generations in organisational decisions, and offers recommendations for practitioners and researchers.

Rudolph, C. W., Rauvola, R. S., Costanza, D. P., & Zacher, H. (2021). Generations and generational differences: Debunking myths in organizational science and practice and paving new paths forward. Journal of Business and Psychology, 36(6), 945-967. A review by Costanza with Rudolph, Rauvola and Zacher. Its abstract calls the evidence for generations at best scant, sets out to bust common myths about them, and recommends a lifespan view of age at work in place of a generational one.

Key ideas

The first idea is that the pooled evidence is the right evidence. A single survey of one workplace can show a gap between younger and older staff, but it cannot show that the gap belongs to a birth group, because age, period and cohort are mixed. A meta-analysis across twenty studies is a stronger test of whether a generational pattern repeats.

The second is that a small effect should be treated as small. The spread of single comparisons in the 2012 paper is wider than the authors' summary, and a few comparisons are not trivial. The authors' reading is the pooled one, near zero.

The third is that the absence of theory matters as much as the absence of effects. The 2015 review notes that there is little theory explaining why generational differences would exist, so a practitioner has no mechanism to reason from.

The fourth is practical: if generational differences are modest to negligible on these variables, interventions built around them may not work, and a manager is better served by looking at the individuals and the job.

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