Individualism, Collectivism and Organizational Structure

Individualism, collectivism and organizational structure

Individualism: Concept of individualism has been discussed in many disciplines. The political philosophers try to understand individualism in light of liberalism related to association with any organization and in terms of equal participation of individuals in any activity. Liberty, equality and fraternity are usual to describe the freedom in political sense. And on many occasion, the individualism is understood in contrast with the European aristocracy. Individualism can be consequence of Protestantism (i.e. humans do not have to go to church to communicate with God), political developments (emphasis on equality and liberty),and economic developments (e.g. affluence).

 Individualism included factors of Self-Reliance with Hedonism, and separation from in-groups.

In 1992, Schwartz has picked concepts like‘ENJOYING LIFE’, ‘PLEASURE’, ‘CHOOSING OWN GOALS’, ‘BROADMINDED’, and ‘DETACHMENT’  being associated with individualistic cultures (Schwartz, 1992;Triandis et al., 1990 in Triandis et al., 1998). In individualistic culture, more emphasis is on the horizontal relationship, and vertical relationships are not equally dominant.

Further individualism has been categorized as vertical and horizontal. Vertical individualism considered self from others marketing pricing, authority ranking(Fiske, 1992) high freedom, low equality (Rokeach, 1973). Horizontal individualism considered selfsame as others and other topologies are Market pricing, Equality matching, high freedom, High equality and Democratic socialism(Triandis et al., 1998). People emphasizing on VI scored especially high on competition and hedonism; those who emphasized on HI scored high on self-reliance.

Similarly, individualism has been studied in cultural context. Walterman (1984) has identified four psychological: 1) propensity for personal identity 2) achieving one’s true self 3) willingness to take personal responsibility and 4) principled moral reasoning (Kapoor and et al., 2003).

For individualistic persons, values are universal and action are consistent with the self-perceived correctness.

These definitions have cultural and national biasness. Demography of sample also affects the dimensionality of the definition of individualism (Taras et al.2014, in Kapoor and et al., 2003)

The commonly used IND-COL measures may simply lack validity. Of the most important albeit unpredicted findings from the present study is that there is a clear disconnect between how IND-COL is defined and hypothesized to affect attitudes, behaviors, and organizational processes and how it is measured.

Furthermore, psychometric properties of the reviewed IND-COL instruments are generally poor.

The internal consistency indices rarely meet or exceeded the commonly accepted criterion of .70(Nunnally, 1978, in Kapoor et al., 2003), and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses almost never produce adequate goodness-of-data-fit indices and item loadings. Based on the available evidence, we simply cannot be certain that the existing instruments of IND-COL measure the theoretical constructs they are expected to measure—and whatever they measure, they do so with low precision and reliability.

Collectivism: As Hofstede has defined the collectivism as tendency to subordinate the individual’s interest to that of common gain and to consider self as part of group.In theirstudy (JETTEN et al., 1998) have shown that national and cultural context also have effect on the perception of collectivism. Collectivist culture takes relationship into consideration before

Individual interest.

Person take situational constrain and social roles and causal reasoning (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994) and (b) meaning is contextualized and memory is likely tocontain richly embedded details.

Collectivism emphasizes on concepts like ‘reciprocating favors’, ‘family security’, ‘honoring parents and elders’, ‘respect for tradition’.

According to Schwartz(1990), collectivist societies are categorized by spread out and mutual obligations and expectations based on attributed grades. In these societies, social units with common fate, common goals, and common values are centralized; the personal is simply a component of the social, making the in-group the key unit of analysis (e.g., Triandis, 1995).

Collectivism also can be classified into Vertical collectivism and horizontal collectivism. Vertical collectivism believes in hierarchical structure whereas horizontal collectivism believes inequality.

Moreover, this definition is not valid everywhere. Israel’s kibbutzim is different from collectivism in Korea.

Concept of vertical collectivism includes self-different from others and low equality, low freedom authority ranking and communal sharing whereas high equality and high freedom characterize the horizontal collectivism.

European aristocratic society can be said to be collective. The collectives and individualism are two values which are studied to understand the behavior of individuals in organization. Many studies in various discipline has focused on the perception of trust, effect on self-presentation

cross-cultural effects on organization.

Many think that individualism and collectivism as bipolar, whereas recent studies have shown perpendicular relationship. Thus, definition cannot be said to be valid though studies have shown the parameters related to collectivism stands out and non-interfering. And attributes related to Vertical collectivism and horizontal collectivism have shown to be non- overlapping.

There are three approaches to measure collectivism – individualism: applying Hofstede, IND-COL Rating Scales and priming cultural frame.

But, collectivism and individualism influence the psychological process as shown by Oyserman and et al. in 2002.But, they found ethnical differences and they failed to universalize the concept to countries which were not represented in data.

Collectivism and individualism is sustained by the societal structure and there are reward and punishment associated with each culture. The self – construal a psychological factor affects the behavior. Factors (idiocentrism and allocentrism) on individual basis are similar to collectivism and individualism.

Collectivism and individualism affects cognition, perception, equity perception and self -projections.  

Organizational Structure: Firstly, organization is a set of independent entities to achieve common goal. The various form of structures are: functional structure, multidivisional structure, matrix structure, team structure, network structure, ambidextrous structure, hypertext structure

Functional structure is that structure in which work and workers are organized into separate units responsible for particular business functions or area of expertise.