Digital Natives and Institutional Pluralism: Managing a Multi-Generational Workforce

The workforce of the future will be mainly composed of Digital Natives (DNs), but little is presently known about how DN employees should be managed. More specifically, in the existing literature, there is a dearth of knowledge on the tensions that can arise between DNs and traditionalists in multi-generational workforce, as well as a lack of actionable prescriptions for managing them, particularly from an institutional perspective. To address these gaps, we conducted a case study of Airparking, one of the most commercially successful carpark sharing platforms in China. Based on the preliminary data from this ongoing study, we constructed a model that identifies three types of tensions that can arise between DNs and traditionalists in the areas of system development, business trajectory, and work orientation. The corresponding ways of resolving these tensions, based on the mechanism of loose coupling, are also presented and discussed in this paper