The monograph addresses four important issues related to people management and concerning the functioning of an employee in an organisation. The authors analyse, among others, the problem of psychophysiological costs incurred by employees performing work that does not match their temperament and activity style, which translates into the style of performing tasks at work; their own research concerning problems with meaningfulness at work; and they propose remedial measures supporting meaningfulness at work that can be applied by organisations and employees themselves. The monograph also presents issues related to building teams that are efficiently led and cooperate to achieve their goals; threats to the accuracy of numerical evaluations and tips on how to interpret those evaluations to which an employee is subjected during an audit. The book is addressed to managers and professionals involved in human resource management, as well as to students and PhD students of management with a specialisation in human resource management, management psychology and management sociology.

Objective: Many research claim that Millennials value work ethic much lower and leisure time much higher than older generations. Most of them are based on cross-sectional analyses of data collected at one time. This design confounds the COHORT effect (born in the same time period and thus exposed to the same cultural forces during their formative socialization period) and biological AGE, and it makes it impossible to separate them. Our goal is to demonstrate how to empirically separate the confounded effects of APC (biological AGE – PERIOD of measurement – COHORT) in a simple way. Methodology: Three generations (Baby Boomers, X-ers and Millennials) from the representative Polish samples of the World Value Survey, were cross-sectionally compared, and a cross-lagged comparison was made between BB in 2005 vs X in 2020, and between X in 2005 and Millennials in 2020. Findings: It was shown that significant cross-sectional differences in attitudes toward work between the 3 generation (with the highest score for Baby Boom-ers and the lowest for Millennials) cannot be explained by age differences. Over the period of 15 years, the importance of leisure time has increased for all generations (PERIOD effect). Value Added: The paper highlights significant methodological problem: the confounding effect of APC in most generational findings. It promotes the idea of using nationally representative samples from publicly available data like World Value Survey, instead of collecting convenience samples. Recommendations: Greater methodological rigour in generational studies is recommended, as their results can create/support stereotypes that tend to generate individual expectations (e.g. every Millennial is computer literate or lazy), ignoring the fact that intra-generational variability is very high.