As one of the key research topic in multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM), aggregation operator has been drawn widespread concern from academics and practitioners. In order to reflect the characteristics of human decision, it is necessary to introduce an operator with compensation ability to close the gap between the theoretical results and experimental results. Based on generalized compensative weighted averaging operator, intuitionistic linguistic generalized compensative weighted averaging (ILGCWA) operator, intuitionistic linguistic generalized compensative ordered weighted averaging (ILGCOWA) operator, and power generalized compensative weighted averaging aggregation (ILPGCWA) operator are developed in this paper. These operators provide two additional parameters to represent decision makers’ attitude and decision makers’ preference for all kinds of alternatives in the aggregation process, respectively. Moreover, some special cases with regard to the generalized parameters p and λ are investigated in detail in ILGCWA operator and ILGCOWA operator. Some examples are employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, which can be applied to solve MCGDM problem with intuitionistic linguistic information. © 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.