Bob Wood is 32. But if you listened to him, you would think he was 65 and washed up. “I graduated from university at a great time. It was 1996. I started as an analyst for Accenture, worked as a health care IT consultant for two other firms, and then became chief technology officer at Claimshop.com, a medical claims processor.” By 2001, Bob was making $80 000 a year plus bonus, driving an expensive European sports car, and optimistic about his future. But Bob Wood has become a statistic. He’s one of the Canadians born between 1966 and 1975 whose peak earnings may be behind them. Bob now makes $44 000 as a technology analyst at a hospital and is trying to adjust to the fact that the go-go years of the late 1990s are history. Like many of his generation, Bob is mired in debt. He owes $23 000 on his university loans and has run up more than $4500 on his credit cards. He faces a world very different from the one his father found when he graduated from college in the early 1960s. “The rules have changed. And we Generations Xers are getting hit hard. We had to go to university to get a decent job. But the majority of us graduated with tuition debt. The good news was that when we graduated, the job market was great. I got a $5000 hiring bonus on my first job! The competition by employers for good people drove salaries up. When I was 28, I was making more money than my dad, who had been with the same company for over 20 years. But my dad has job security. And he has a nice retirement plan that will pay him a guaranteed pension when he turns 58. Now look at me. I don’t know if I’ll ever make $80 000 again. If I do, it’ll be in 20 or more years. I have no job security. I’m paying $350 a month on my university loans. I’m paying another $250 more in payments on my BMW. And my girlfriend says it’s time for us to settle down and get married. It would be nice to own a house, but how can I commit myself to a 30-year mortgage when I don’t know if I’ll have a job in six months?” 

Questions

1. Analyze Bob using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

2. Analyze Bob’s lack of motivation using equity theory and expectancy theory. 

3. If you were Bob’s boss, what could you do to positively influence his motivation? 

4. What are the implications of this case for employers hiring Generation Xers?