On the individualism index, the United States has an index number of 91 out of the full score of , whereas China has a significantly lower index score at Collectivism focuses on the group, while individualism focuses on the individual.
As corporate ideologies, the two have immense influence over leadership and organizational management. Collectivist leadership stresses on the interests of the company as a whole rather than individual interests. However, in practice, leadership and organizational culture is neither one or the other, and representations of both are present in some aspects in every leader and organization. It means that these cultures, among many, highly favour a strongly defined social framework in which individuals are expected to conform to the ideals of the society and the in-groups to which they belong.
In the workplace, collectivist cultures focus on the good of the team and the company over those of the individual. The values of acceptance, belonging and being a team player are deemed advantageous when working in a collectivist culture. In a collectivist workplace culture, decisions are made through collaboration and group consensus. They focus on the importance of team or organisation goals and needs.
The downside to collectivist company cultures is that they are more likely to exist in a homogenous environment. Employees are strongly encouraged to adopt the values, views, and motivations of the group, and are consequently discouraged form expressing their own individual values, beliefs, and motivations. However, working together to achieve a goal is a fundamental aspect of human nature. In has indeed brought the human human civilization to our current era of progress.
From corporations to democracies, to community groups, cooperation has worked for the betterment of everybody involved. The workplace, as we know it, is filled with nuances. In an individualistic workplace culture, focus is drawn towards the individual employee and their specific needs. Individualism grew to be a central part of the American culture by the 19th century, and continues to flourish in all aspects of American society, including work.
Individualistic workplaces tend to be highly competitive, because it encourages employees to believe that performing their best will enable them to reach their professional goals, which will make them efficient and effective. Employees working in an individualistic work culture tend to be highly productive and self-motivated. They are encouraged to be expressive and unique.
However, increased focus on the individual may bring positive attention to one, but alienate the rest. Collaboration might be viewed as worthless or an inconvenience. Employees in such a organisation may feel immense competition, which can consequently induce insecurities, stress, and anxiety. Working under high levels of stress will also leave employees feeling burned out. The solution to a healthy individualist work cultures is to understand how to positively integrate it into the workplace.
Leadership can offer trainings to show employees how harmony and collaboration in the workplace can help everyone reach their individual goals. Employees can compete in a healthy environment and still maintain the well-being of the team and the organization. Although collectivism and individualism are often pitted against one another, the reality is that communities, societies, nations and organizations cannot be defined as purely collectivistic and individualistic.
They evolve, change shape and form, are nuanced, and exist between blurred lines. Here are 6 workplace horror stories that you wish were not true. People feel included when they are treated equitably and with respect. While individualistic relationships tend to work as social contracts, collectivist relationships work on agreeability Kemmelmeier Agreeability often comes at the cost of honesty, and specific forms of dishonesty can be socially sanctioned.
Collectivism also alters how people see social situations. For example, the traditional Japanese tea ceremony involves a group sitting in an uncomfortable position for about an hour around a fascinating object, with the highest ranking member sitting closest to the object and the lowest ranking member sitting the farthest away. The group members listen to the distinctive sounds of hot and cold water falling before tea is offered to the highest ranking member.
He must decline a specific number of times before accepting, after which the tea is offered to the second-highest ranking member. This calculated process of denial continues with each member and follows a strict sense of customs which must not be broken. However, the formalized rituals of collectivism are fading as countries undergo rapid economic growth.
For example, few in the younger Japanese population have experienced a tea ceremony Triandis This parallels a general decline in traditional roles, such as Japanese adults caring for elders Bellah Collectivists value conformity within the ingroup, but this is not so with relation to outgroups.
Counterintuitively, those in highly collectivistic cultures can display anti-conformity at higher levels than those from individualistic cultures. Although collectivism values harmony, more recent studies on collectivist ingroups show that members of collectivist ingroups can be more vigilant with respect to other group members than those in individualistic ingroups, mindful of the unethical intentions of others Liu et.
As the people in these groups are interdependent, the unethical behavior of an individual can be the downfall of all. Triandis recounts the story of a Japanese school child who has lived in Tokyo but returned to his rural town. Not speaking the local dialect, he was bullied by the group of schoolchildren as a whole and eventually found dead in a utility closet. However, collectivist cultures tend to have lower suicide rates as a whole Eskin et. Matsumoto discovered that collectivists more readily perceive sadness than individualists, and are less likely to perceive happiness.
Aaron Cargile has theorized that this is because collectivists tend to find rating oneself as better than others as undesirable. Japanese men and women tend to underrate - or more realistically rate - their skills in comparison to others.
As a result, collectivist culture is associated with lower levels of self esteem and feelings of mastery Yetim Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University. Coming from a research background in biology and archeology, Charlotte currently studies how digital and physical space shapes human beliefs, norms, and behaviors and how this can be used to create businesses with greater social impact. Nickerson, C.
Understanding collectivist cultures. Simply Psychology. Agassi, J. Theories of gender equality: lessons from the Israeli Kibbutz. When personality and culture clash: the psychological distress of allocentrics in an individualist culture and idiocentrics in a collectivist culture.
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Bianchi, E. American individualism rises and falls with the economy: Cross-temporal evidence that individualism declines when the economy falters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4 , Cao, J.
Cross-cultural Communication. Eskin, M. Voracek, M. Is Individualism Suicidogenic? Frontiers in psychiatry, 11, Frager, R. Conformity and anticonformity in Japan [American Psychological Association doi Giles, A. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26 3 , Individualist-collectivist tendencies in a Turkish sample. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 28 6 , Individualist-Collectivist Tendencies in a Turkish Sample.
Hofstede, G. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the mind. London, England: McGraw-Hill. Kagitcibasi, C. Individualism and collectivism. Kagitcibasi Ed. Social behavior and applications. Kagitcibasia, C. The accounts examined in this paper highlight the lack of a clear line of demarcation between employer control and market dictates, especially as platform algorithms become increasingly adept at reflecting and predicting market demand.
We argue, therefore, that this constitutes a structural ambiguity in a worker's employment status partly determined by their degree of freedom in choosing when and how to work.
Moreover, this ambivalence suggests conflict will be an inevitable part of this work paradigm. Deindustrialization is neither the end to collectivism nor trade unionism: rather than post-work we explore the problematics of plus work and variant collectivisms. One of the challenges in researching work in the platform economy is the socio-economic heterogeneity of platform workers.
Platform work encompasses different sets of workers, from those who are high skilled such as in high-level consulting to low skilled like data entry. To reduce this complexity, we focus here on one set of workers who have become a paradigmatic example of platform work in public debates: food delivery couriers, working for platforms such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Foodora, Just Eat, etc.
Such workers have contested the definition of their employment status, given that these low-skill tasks are performed in the context of an ongoing relationship, even though platforms themselves publicly stress the lack of formal engagement.
We used semi-structured interviews with 14 male platform workers there are few women in the sector between the ages of 20 and 36 across Europe UK, France, Germany and Italy. The majority were students, five worked for delivery platforms as their primary job, and one was a more traditional freelancer, using platform work to top up his income see Table 1.
The limited sample size reflects the exploratory nature of our research and we complement with our analysis of protest materials from the four countries. Furthermore, the expert informants from Italy and Germany, a long with those from France and the UK, are used to complete the national protest materials in order to contextualize the responses of the interviewees within the public articulation of grievances at the societal level.
Systematic sampling of representative populations is made difficult by the specific characteristics of this workforce Chai and Scully, We therefore approached couriers in informal gathering places, both physical and virtual, employing a convenience sampling strategy to access as many participants as possible in this dispersed and hard-to-reach population.
We are mindful that the couriers who responded to our calls for participants are unlikely to be representative of the wider courier population, being both available and willing to participate in our study.
However, in light of the existing research to date and our informal engagement with couriers' online support and protest groups, we are confident that the issues raised are consistent with the experiences of couriers more generally. Platform couriers engaged in a wave of protests and strikes throughout across a number of European countries, and many of the actions were organized and publicized via social media.
As part of our research, we conducted a systematic analysis of the complaints and demands associated with these actions to identify articulated worker interests in conflict with food delivery platform firms.
As a first step, we constructed a timeline of significant strikes and demonstrations in the UK, France, Italy and Germany from news reports, beginning in August Other materials, including statements, leaflets, posters, placard images and banners, together with social media posts relating to the protests, were collected.
These searches uncovered other lower-profile protests that enriched our data. Given that these groups tend to promote one another's efforts, we were able to identify additional groups claiming to speak for the couriers, thus this became an iterative process, with each group highlighting further events and groups.
We then reviewed the texts and images, with a focus on identifying concrete demands. While bearing in mind that these materials are not representative of all platform workers, we took the number of appearances of a given element to be a rough proxy for its importance at least to the protesting couriers.
As Stephenson and Stewart argue, collectivism is reducible neither to worker behavior nor to worker expectations. Individualism-collectivism takes myriad forms premised as it upon the social-technical character of the work organization and the labor process. While platforms typically seek to foster individualistic attitudes qua transactional orientations amongst workers, in our research these were not exclusive of other orientations, including collectivist ones. Affirming transactional commitment did not exclude a collectivist orientation.
As we discovered, a shake-up in employment experiences indeed proved to be a great driver of solidaristic consciousness and action. Our initial analysis of the interview transcripts identified a number of emerging themes relating to expectations as workers in the platform economy.
Second, we identify a series of obligations between couriers and platforms that the former perceived as having been transgressed. Third, we identify a series of exchanges between the couriers and other stakeholders—customers and restaurants. As expected, given the ongoing debates and lack of legal clarity, few couriers classified their status as unambiguously that of either an employee or a self-employed worker.
Couriers found themselves drawing parallels both with employees and more traditionally defined self-employed workers, while perceiving that they fell between the two:.
I mean they are supplying the kit, with branding on it, but you don't actually—it even says it in the contracts that you don't have to wear the uniform and you are free to work for whoever you want, even if you are wearing our uniform. So I can do a [Platform 2] job covered in [Platform 1].
It doesn't matter, they don't really care about that. And I think it's to avoid them looking like they're employing me, I think it's a legal thing. But it helps me, it's great, I don't have to change my clothes or anything. But if I worked like all the day I think it's unfair because you must take an insurance and In addition, beyond questions of employment status, interviewees reflected on expectations, their relationship with the platform, and moments when perceived obligations were not honored.
Participants identified obligations they believed the platform had toward them:. People who work really hard for them. So I worked very hard initially to ensure that I was in the upper percentile of people that'd get the extra money.
And that was never, that never materialized, even though that was promised in writing to me, I have the emails. It can be bad for the image for the enterprise, for [Platform 1], and for me.
So I hadn't planned on doing that, I'd planned on taking a week and then signing up, but because of that I signed up for the weekend. It also emerged that respondents considered relationships with other parties as important, including restaurants, customers and other couriers:. It's a human thing that I did with him. Through these emerging themes, we observe that platforms aim to foster transactional rather than relational relationships with their workers Cullinane and Dundon, Such an approach supports their public and quasi-legal position that platform workers are not in fact employees but rather self-employed contractors.
The rhetoric of these platforms has emphasized the lack of relational elements to their relationships with workers—for instance, by not requiring workers to act as brand ambassadors by wearing logoed uniforms, and explicitly confirming that couriers are free to simultaneously work for competitor platforms.
The manner in which workers are paid, piecemeal for individual tasks, is perhaps the clearest public indication to workers that the relationship is purely transactional. There is no explicit system for directly rewarding anything extra couriers may do to advance the other interests of the firm. Couriers' multiple relationships, however, complicate the straightforward expectations between platform and courier and contribute to competing narratives, as discussed in the next section.
From their perspective, the couriers profess a variety of understandings of the courier-platform relationship, and express varying attitudes toward platforms and the platform economy. Following Pasquale, we reviewed the transcripts with a view to exploring the competing understandings in couriers' accounts of their work. We found that couriers employ at least three distinct narratives, threaded through our respondents' testimonies: platform work as leisure, as economic opportunity, and as collectivist labor.
The first two roughly correspond to narratives put forward by platforms themselves, while the third reflects the account favored by dissatisfied couriers, as well as protestors and trade unions.
Here we outline each of these three narratives, before exploring the implications for our concern with the relationship between individualism and collectivism in the courier labor process. In doing so, we identify a number of tensions between the three narratives see Table 2. The first narrative of what delivery couriers do highlights the aspects that make it resemble a sport or videogame. Here the emphasis is on the physical performance of couriers, their speed and statistics.
Indeed the data generated by couriers and displayed in the platform apps perhaps encourages this understanding, with metrics recorded on various aspects of each couriers' own performance, and foregrounding images of fit couriers in athletic wear.
A second narrative is of platform work as freelancing, whereby couriers are each proprietors of their own small business, claiming more autonomy and flexibility for themselves than they could achieve through traditional employment. But then there're other people who really don't care, like myself, all I'm interested in is getting paid for what I do, and if I don't do it and you don't pay me then fair enough.
If I go [on holiday] every year […] it won't bother me in the slightest that I won't be getting paid while I'm there. But I guess people have got different ideas about that. This understanding emphasizes individual responsibility, with the platform cast as a facilitator of couriers' economic empowerment, providing tools for self-employment.
Platforms' obligations to couriers thus begin and end with those of a software provider's obligations to its clients. For their part, couriers have no obligations to the platform and are free to behave as they deem fit when interacting with restaurants, customers and other couriers—those who deliver promptly, avoid canceling orders and shifts and gain good ratings from customers and restaurants will find that their business is more successful than that of others.
This perception of economic empowerment, as with the first narrative, is undermined by the rider's dependence upon the platform for economic activity sui generis: obligations are one way from courier to platform , as is responsibility. A third narrative woven through almost all respondents' testimonies is that of platform work as precarious labor.
This latter is typically perceived by workers within the terms of a collectivist framework, defined by Stephenson and Stewart as workplace collectivism. Here, we might speak of work space collectivism, since of course the essential characteristic of platform gig work is the determinate absence of a common workplace. The narrative suggests that couriers are exploited and highlights the ways in which delivery riding resembles other low-paid, manual or service work. Couriers themselves underline the insecurity of their earnings due to fluctuations in demand, courier supply and a lack of guaranteed hours for platforms operating shift systems.
For those couriers who are financially dependent on platform work, the lack of sick pay is important and encourages a scarcity mind-set Shah et al. A lack of clarity regarding platform sanctions account deactivation or unfavorable access to shifts further exacerbates feelings of precariousness, with some couriers reporting low confidence that they will be permitted to continue working through the platform from 1 week to the next. The couriers generally recognize that they bear a much greater burden of risk regarding fluctuations in the matching of supply and demand than in traditional employment situations, and that there is little cost to the platform of over-recruiting couriers.
This precarity is one of the drivers of protests across European countries and the emergence of a collectivist labor narrative Tassinari and Maccarrone, Through our own analysis of the protest materials, we were able to identify specific demands and rhetoric linked to the precarious labor narrative.
Despite some variation between countries—potentially attributable to differing legal contexts and thus policies on the parts of the platforms—we found a high level of consistency. Table 3 summarizes the results with percentages and coloring to indicate high and low priorities green and red, respectively , weighted according to the overall number of references for each country.
This analysis suggests that platform workers were not necessarily asking for promotion opportunities, the company to invest in their professional development, significant changes to the nature of the work or recognition of their individual talents and needs.
Two high-priority elements—fair pay and job security—might appear to amount to demands for a relational exchange. However, by reviewing each of these references and the coding more carefully, we found that, again, these demands were notably transactional. For example, when it came to demands regarding job security, the protestors call for guaranteed hours and management of labor supply, not long-term contracts.
Although the terms and conditions for platform work appear on the surface to be clear, the protest materials reveal evidence of broken promises. We found evidence of poorer conditions imposed unilaterally by the platforms, suggesting, perhaps, that the original or advertised conditions were acceptable to at least some of those who had taken the job to begin with. Secondly, the protestors indicated that the exchange between the worker and the platform requires balance, with many complaints rooted in the imbalance of this power relationship.
At the same time, the collective protests also referred to the lack of alternatives as a reason for their disempowerment, explaining why riders enter into and remain in jobs with conditions they considered unacceptable. Furthermore, there is evidence that protestors contest their employment status, highlighting the ways in which they are more akin to employees than self-employed workers and arguing that this classification constitutes a legal loophole exploited by platforms to deprive workers of employment protections and the minimum wage.
Overall, couriers registered dissatisfaction with their identity as self-employed workers rather than employees. A collectivist labor narrative is arguably the driver of a collectivism that many feel has become less present in post-industrial working environments. Not only less present but also structurally less possible due to the apparent fragmentation of the collective worker, a situation reflected in platform organization and labor processes.
Moreover, those interviewees articulating a collectivist worker narrative frequently perceived their place as workers positioned within an exploitative capital-labor relationship that provided the spur to collectivist labor organization. Speaking about his experience as a courier and union organizer with the IWW, UK5 argued that couriers' protest and strike activity was attributable to a reduction in pay at Platform So what they've done over the last year is they've increased the range that they'll sort of cover within a delivery, and they've adjusted the pay system so as to pay us more for the longer journeys but to pay us less for the shorter journeys.
And most people fear that overall they're seeing their pay go down as a result, and that like right from the start, that was the assumption that that was what they were playing at. The second thing is that, so in [Platform 1] you need to […] book these hour-long shifts, and they're released on a Monday afternoon for the following week.
So you book 2 weeks in advance, to get a priority in booking those shifts, you need to have good statistics, basically a rating system for each rider. And they've adjusted how that works. So basically, they've got more control over when you're working. And if you book a shift, previously it was enough just to log on to the account as having attended that shift. Now you need to log on for a certain amount of time.
And assuming you're offered orders, you need to accept at least one of them and so on. So again, it reduces the flexibility of riders and especially those who are working for multiple apps, and might log on to [Platform 1] to tick the box.
But take an order from Platform 2, for example, now you're forced to actually take the orders for [Platform 1]. So the way that people had been sort of gaming it, I guess, has been undermined.
And that's caused a lot of— it's a breach of the kind of informal contract relationship between the couriers and [Platform 1]. And that's angered a lot of people and put a lot of people in a bad situation. This is interesting for at least two reasons. Second, it reveals the extent to which platforms are actually attempting to force workers to make themselves flexible only to one firm: again, using the potential scope promised by platforms for worker autonomy as a way to reduce workers' actual autonomy on the labor market.
Moreover, the reasons given by firms for changes to pay did not convince:. Give you a pay cut, so you can become more flexible, it doesn't really—nobody, they will always tag on a reason but it never sells to riders.
If changes to conditions provide a basis for formal and informal mobilization, as important to collectivism is the management of couriers' labor process. Couriers complain that the way in which platforms detail and provide labor suffers from a lack of transparency and moreover that this opacity is a deliberate feature of the management of courier time, work and labor process organization:. It might be on the level, as simple as if something goes wrong in a delivery, you try and contact rider support.
And they just completely fail to even understand the situation. Perhaps they've accused you of doing something wrong, but they won't tell you what you've done wrong or whatever. So it's that aspect of transparency is a really big concern across the board in that sense that there's a there's a black box that we can shout into with no idea what is happening or what is being said or how decisions are made and so on.
So that continues to be a big concern. I don't know how it works, cause I've never really known anyone or experienced it myself, but I'm guessing that's the way it would work that they'd take the repeat shifts away from you.
What is more, in several instances this lack of trust has been the important factor in a number of protests against platforms:. What happened with [Platform 1] is, in Paris, they were paid by the hour and after they were paid by the delivery. So it reduced their rights and they weren't happy. In summary we can say that few of the respondents exclusively adhered to any single one of these narratives.
Rather, they borrowed from each throughout our interactions in examining different aspects of the work, giving rise to tensions and uncertainty. The economic opportunity narrative is most straightforward in its implications for couriers' employment status, solidly aligning with claims that couriers are self-employed workers. Here participants emphasize that delivery riding allows them to make money without committing to specific hours or taking orders from a superior, adhering to this narrative of individual responsibility and choice.
The leisure narrative, on the other hand, calls the entire premise of the employment status debate into question. If delivering is just part of a game, then maybe it is misguided to ask what type of work it is. The implications of the collectivist labor narrative for the couriers' employment status is less clear-cut.
Some value the flexibility platform work provides and express doubt that such flexibility would be possible with a more secure contract. Others seem to suggest that some sort of intermediate status between employment and self-employment might be preferable. Unions and protest groups, for their part, argue that it is incorrect to believe flexibility is incompatible with security.
One implication of the economic opportunity understanding of platform work might be the expectation of a minimal relationship, and thus minimal obligations, between the platform and the courier. This understanding is clear to see in the interviews. Couriers generally underline the lack of a relationship, noting that they do not believe the platform considers their interests and so highlighting the transactional nature of their relationship.
Nevertheless, there is still some disappointment that the platform does not acknowledge or reward exceptional performance:. The app-mediated relationship of couriers with the platform also seems to contribute to the perception that few obligations exist between the courier and the platform. This minimal relationship informs the types of perceived obligations couriers understand.
Even those couriers most positive about the platform they use were clear that they owed no loyalty to the platform, and claimed that they would switch to a competitor if they were to offer better pay or conditions. Underlying these minimal obligations seems to be a belief that the exchange with the platform is governed by a purely market logic, which we might understand to be part of the economic opportunity narrative. Couriers recognize that they are valued according to the supply of and demand for their labor, pointing to the low barriers to entry for the job, and the weak bargaining position that comes with it.
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