Section Twowanting to take pride in their work, being involved in their jobs,
and performing meaningful work. The initial work experience of
young employees, even in relatively low-level jobs, apparently
has the potential to shift their work value foci from extrinsic to
intrinsic work aspects. Interestingly, it is only after lengthy
socialization in the work environment that there are work value
changes from intrinsic to extrinsic.^31 The implications of these
findings are that blaming young entrants to the labor market
for an emphasis on extrinsically oriented work values may be
counterproductive because the real cause for such values may
be companies’ mismanagement of the socialization process of
young workers.
Further research indicates that younger U.S. workers are
not more materialistic than workers from other countries. A
comprehensive study compared work values of subjects from
the United States, Germany, Holland, Israel, Korea, Taiwan,
China, and Hungary. The U.S. sample was drawn from
undergraduate and graduate business students mostly between
the ages of 21 and 39, of which more than 90 percent were
employed in full-time jobs from a broad range of occupations.
The responses of the subjects, who were asked to rank 24
work values, revealed the following:
- U.S. subjects ranked pay 15th, which was about the
same for most other countries.