Individualism and collectivism in the workplace

Employed persons in an individualist culture are expected to act according to their own interest, and work should be organized in such a way that this self-interest and the employer's interest coincide. Workers are supposed to act as 'economic men', or as people with a combination of economic and psychological needs, but in either case as individuals with their own needs. In a collectivist culture an employer never hires just an individual, but a person who belongs to an ingroup. The employee will act according to the interest of this ingroup, which may not always coincide with his or her individual interest: self-effacement in the interest of the ingroup belongs to the normal expectations in such a society. Often earnings have to be shared with relatives.

The hiring process in a collectivist society always takes the ingroup into account. Usually preference is given to hiring relatives, first of all of the employer, but also of other persons already employed by the company. Hiring persons from a family one already knows reduces risks. Also, relatives will be concerned about the reputation of the family and help to correct misbehavior of a family member. In the individualist society family relationships at work are often considered undesirable as they may lead to nepotism and to a conflict of interest. Some companies have a rule that if one employee marries another, one of them has to leave.

The workplace itself in a collectivist society may become an ingroup in the emotional sense of the word. In some countries this is more the case than in others, but the feeling that it should be this way is nearly always present. The relationship between employer and employee is seen in moral terms. It resembles a family relationship with mutual obligations of protection in exchange for loyalty. Poor performance of an employee in this relationship is no reason for dismissal: one does not dismiss one's child. Performance and skills, however, do determine what tasks one assigns to an employee. This pattern of relationships is best known from Japanese organizations. In Japan it applies in a strict sense only to the group of permanent employees which may be less than half of the total work force. Japan scores halfway on the ID V scale. In individualist societies the relationship between employer and employee is primarily conceived as a business transaction, a calculative relationship between buyers and sellers on a 'labor market'. Poor perform­ance on the part of the employee or a better pay offer from another employer are legitimate and socially accepted reasons for terminating a work relationship.

Christopher Earley a management researcher from the USA, has illus­trated the difference in work ethos between an individualist and a collectivist society very neatly with a laboratory experiment. In the experiment, 48 management trainees from southern China and 48 matched management trainees from the USA were given an 'in-basket task'. The task consisted of 40 separate items requiring between two and five minutes each, like writing memos, evaluating plans, and rating job candidates' application forms. Half of the participants in either country were given a group goal of 200 items to be completed in an hour by 10 people; the other half were given each an individual goal of 20 items. Also, half of the participants in either country, both from the group goal and from the individual goal subset, were asked to mark each item completed with their name, the other half turned them in anonymously.

The Chinese, collectivist, participants performed best when operating with a group goal, and anonymously. They performed worst when operating individually and with their name marked on the items produced. The American, individualist, participants performed best when operating individually and with their name marked, and abysmally low when operating as a group and anonymously. All participants were also given a values test to determine their personal individualism or collectivism: a minority of the Chinese scored individualist, and these performed according to the US pattern; a minority of the Americans scored collectivist and these performed like the Chinese.

In practice there is a wide range of types of employer-employee relation­ships within collectivist and individualist societies. There are employers in collectivist countries who do not respect the societal norm to treat their, employees as ingroup members, but then the employees in turn do not repay them in terms of loyalty. Labor unions in such cases may replace the work organization as an emotional ingroup and there can be violent union-management conflicts, as in parts of India. There are employers in individualist societies who have established a strong group cohesion with their employees, with the same protection-versus-loyalty balance which is the norm in the collectivist society. Organization cultures can to some extent deviate from majority norms and derive a competitive advantage from their originality.

Management in an individualist society is management of individuals. Subordinates can usually be moved around individually; if incentives or bonuses are given, these should be linked to an individual's performance. Management in a collectivist society is management of groups. The extent to which people actually feel emotionally integrated into a work group may differ from one situation to another. Ethnic and other ingroup differences within the work group play a role in the integration process and managers within a collectivist culture will be extremely attentive to such factors. It often makes good sense to put people from the same ethnic background into one crew, although individualistically programmed managers usually con­sider this dangerous and want to do the opposite. If the work group functions as an emotional ingroup, incentives and bonuses should be given to the group, not to individuals.

Within countries with a dominant individualist middle-class culture, regional rural subcultures have sometimes retained strongly collectivist elements. The same applies to the migrant worker minorities which form majorities among the work force in some industries in some individualist countries. In such cases a culture conflict is likely between managers and regional or minority workers. This conflict expresses itself, among other things in the management's extreme hesitation to use group incentives in

Maslow's main book in which he explained his theories (Maslow, 1970) is based on a concept of personality which is common in Western thinking, but which is not universal. The Chinese-American anthropologist Francis Hsu has shown that the Chinese language has no equivalent for 'personality' in the Western sense. Personality in the West is a separate entity, distinct from society and culture: an attribute of the individual. The closest translation into Chinese is jen (rеп in the modern transcription), which stands for 'person' as a 'human constant', which includes not only the individual but also his or her intimate societal and cultural environment which makes his or her existence meaningful (Hsu, 1971).