“You never say thank you,” young advertising copywriter Peggy Olson complains to her boss, Don Draper.
“That’s what the money is for!” he retorts.
This exchange from TV’s Mad Men perfectly captures one of the enduring challenges of the workplace: sometimes managers and employees have vastly different notions of which incentives really matter.
I would argue that-including in the case of Peggy and Don-there is a generational component to such differences. Don, a child of the Great Depression and a Korean War veteran, is a classic Traditionalist (the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s) for whom work is a transaction. As he says earlier in this exchange, “I give you money, you give me ideas.”
Dispatches From The Front 