The Organizational Impact of Digital Natives

The last years yielded many studies in industry and academia in attempt to understand what implications young people who use technology frequently and heavily have on society. The next generation of employees in modern societies that have grown up in a world surrounded by connectivity and digital tools are called digital natives. While some researchers label them as “digital natives”, people, who have never known a world without digital presence, some researchers argue that this nomenclature is not adequate and it may miss the individual characteristics which this group may have, or miss other groups who are on the dark side of digital divide/s and do not have the same skills or use technologies as others.

While identifying the strong individual and contextual component, in this paper we look at some common denominators of behavior, values and attitudes among that group, to successfully analyze phenomena which increasingly occur in the work environment. A growing body of literature reports that this generation may encounter some conflicts, tensions and challenges when entering the work environment, due to maybe a different set of skills that they have acquired during their digital years, or different set of values and norms which are more common among digital natives but are less common in traditional organizations. We try to understand and learn this issue.

This is study is undergoing – here are tentative findings that were published in The International Conference on Management of Technology – http://ekarine.org/wp-admin/pub/IAMOT_DN_2008.pdf

Tags: Digital natives, Organizations, Young