The Relationship of Communication Styles of Millennial Employees with the Communication Satisfaction and Perceptions of Communicator Competence of Their Supervisors

Each generation in the workplace shares characteristics that distinguish them from the generations before them. These differences in personality, behavior, and attitudes can result in intergenerational conflict, and these dynamics were identified by researchers when describing the interaction between young Millennial workers and their supervisors of the older generations. However, research did not explicitly test if these differences extend to the different communication styles that people exhibited in their verbal interactions. One such communication style paradigm, the Mok’s Communication Styles Survey (MCSS), describes the actual communication style of an individual, and was used to see if Millennials communicated differently than their supervisors. The purpose of this study was to administer the MCSS to determine the communication style of Millennial employees working in professional service organizations. Also, the study investigated the relationship between the Millennials’ communication styles and their communication satisfaction with their supervisors, and the perceived communicator competence of their supervisors as determined by the Interpersonal Communication Satisfaction Inventory (ICSI) and the Communicator Competence Questionnaire (CCQ), respectively