When a 51-year-old ad sales director gets demoted to the position of "totally awesome wingman" to a 26-year-old meteoric executive, the movie "In Good Company" flirts with generational conflict in today’s workplace.

The sales director, Dennis Quaid, has a pregnant wife, a daughter headed to a college he can’t afford and little recourse but to accept second fiddle to up-and-comer Topher Grace. No matter how much the younger executive may or may not know, he’s the boss.

"It’s a tension we hear a lot about," notes Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York. "The assumption is that there is a lot of tension between generations."

Some of the nation’s largest companies – Abbott Laboratories, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, IBM and Johnson & Johnson among them – hired FWI to find out just how alienated generations might feel in their workplaces. The goal of the project was to help these companies develop ways of mobilizing everyone into a cohesive work unit.

How well generations accept others plays an important role in a peaceful and productive workplace. From a young boss barking orders to older workers, to older workers who simply won’t accept how talented younger workers are, the potential for conflict is strong.

Conflicts Rare

"There are instances where it is conflictive and there are times where there is a difference in values, but I was surprised to find how rare this really is," Galinsky observes. "It appears that we may have exaggerated the differences to make them seem more pronounced than they really are."

There are four distinct generations in today’s workplace, led by older workers ages 60 and above, Baby Boomers ages 40 to 59, Generation X ages 25 to 39, and the latest entrant, Generation Y ages 18 to 24.

FWI’s study found that older workers generally rate the competency of their supervisors higher than other workers, whether they are older or younger than they are.

"Although we don’t have empirical data about why older employees don’t tend to view their younger bosses negatively, the fact is that most do not," FWI concludes in the report. "It appears that common wisdom underestimates the capacity of older workers to positively adapt to social change."

Sondra Thiederman, a San Diego workplace diversity expert and author of the book Making Diversity Work, thinks she knows why. "Every generation is different than the one before it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t work well with other generations. But we always seem to start off thinking that way."

Take Generation X. Eight or ten years ago, we were warned that Gen X was different, that it wouldn’t stand for workplace lifestyles that had become the norm of older workers.

Gen X described itself as self-reliant, wanting variety and not planning to stay in jobs for more than a couple of years before moving on.

Older generations looked at Gen Xers as self-absorbed, unlikely to become team players and, at times, irresponsible.

"Well, if you look at what has happened in recent years, Gen X is really none of that," Thiederman points out. "They are people in their 30s who are married with kids, and they are settling into their jobs more than anyone expected. They do have some different cultural values, but they haven’t dissolved the fabric of our companies, as some feared."

Respecting Differences

Just as you would tackle diversity of national origin, ethnicity or gender, the key to a healthy workplace is to have workers who develop a mutual respect for what others bring to the job, Thiederman believes.

"These people don’t have to be the same, but you want to find a way for them to have mutual respect for each other," she continues.

FWI’s study shows that there may not be as pronounced a gulf between generations as we once thought, but it certainly indicates that generations are different.

"Generation X has more family values and isn’t as likely as older workers to put all its eggs in one basket," Galinsky feels. "On the other hand, it has seen all the downsizing and economic uncertainty in recent years and Gen X really wants job security. That’s not so different, is it?"