McIntire School of Commerce University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia

Assignment for COMM4559

Individualism in the US
Prepared For:
Professor Christopher L. Wilcox Elliot Assistant Dean, Student Life & Global Programs

Prepared by:
Jonathan Ng Jun Kiat 4th Year Commerce, Student Exchange Program Fall Semester, AY 2013/2014

As the U.S. moves into the 21st century, its previously unassailable position as the world super-power is increasingly being challenged by the re-emerging economies of the Far East while its domestic electorate is polarized as never before, leading to a state of political stasis and ailing economic health. Have the contemporary ideals and values of the great United States become anachronistic in modern times? Innovation, individualism, creativity;

some of the oft-espoused core tenets of business culture that have provided the engines of growth for America come under scrutiny in this paper. In particular, we look into how individualism in the context of Americas businesses has shaped its faade into the monolithic yet waning business powerhouse it is today. Individualism is defined as a doctrine that the interests of the individual are or thought to be ethically paramount, a culture encompassing qualities including independence, selfreliance, and a belief that every man could build and achieve his own American dream through toil and labour. It is the idea that the individuals life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit, to act on his own judgment, to keep and use the product of his effort, and to pursue the values of his choosing. It is the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself, and the fundamental unit of moral concern. This is the ideal that the American Founders set forth and sought to establish when they drafted the Declaration and the Constitution and created a country in which the individuals rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were to be recognized and protected, forever enshrined in the words of Thomas Jefferson. An analysis of the historical timeline of America sheds some light on our issue. In the context of Virginia, the Virginia Company of London was an entirely entrepreneurial venture that founded Jamestown in 1607: The new world spurred the birth of nations, bringing in brave entrepreneurial settlers into virgin land where each man could claim his own fortune in accordance to his efforts. Later in 1776, The Declaration of Independence encapsulated the values of individualism in its emphasis on individual freedom, individual thought, individual liberty, and individual action. The Declaration of Independence is emblematic of the eighteenth-century regard for the interests of the individual. Taking as unquestionably "self evident" the idea that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the Declaration makes the rights and potential of the individual the cornerstone of American values. The fact that these lines from the Declaration are among the most quoted in all of American letters testifies to the power and resonance of this commitment to individual freedom in American culture. In 1996, Seymour Martin Lipset resonated the words of the Declaration, opining that the American Creed explicitly stresses that each individual should enjoy equality of opportunity and respect, but not necessarily equality of result of condition, and that people should be treated primarily as individuals in this regard, not as members of collectivities. (Lipset, 1996) By the nineteenth century, a measure of Americans was becoming more radical in their commitment to individualism, and a growing concern over the people left out of the American Dream fueled reform movements designed to extend individual rights to the historically disenfranchised and oppressed. Calls for the abolition of slavery, Native American rights, women's rights, and help for the impoverished, challenged American society to make good on its proclamation that all are created equal. As social critic Albert Brisbane put it, "Monotony, uniformity, intellectual inaction, and torpor reign . . . society is spiritually a desert." (Brisbane, 1844) Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed, warning that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members ... the virtue in most request is conformity." (Emerson, 1841) Evidently, history is rife with manifestations of the individualistic nature of Americas people and continues to be a pervasive element of her people in and out of the workplace in modern America today, with numerous studies and reports espousing the very same dominance of individualism manifesting itself in contemporary American society.

In 1989, Christopher Earley, an American management researcher, gave 48 management trainees from China and a matched group of 48 management trainees from America an in-basket-task consisting of 40 separate items (Earley, 1989). Half of the participants from each country were given an individual goal of 20 items; the other half were given a group goal of 200 items to be completed in one hour by 10 people. In addition, half of the participants from either country, both from the group and from the individual goal subsets, were asked to mark each item with their name; the other half turned them in anonymously. The Chinese participants performed best when operating with a group goal and anonymously. They performed worst when operating individually and with their name marked on their work. The individualist Americans performed best when operating individually and with their work attributed to them personally, and performed very poorly when operating as a group and anonymously. Moving closer to modern day, we analyze a study provided by the Hofstede Centre in 2010. The Hofstede Centre conducts one of the most comprehensive studies of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. The report ranks countries based on various drivers of their culture, of which America ranks most highly on Individualism amongst other drivers. With a score of 91 out of 100 for individualism, the US claims the pole position for the most individualistic country in the world. Professor Geert Hofstede claims that the United States has a highly individualistic culture, which translates into a loosely-knit society in which the expectation is that people look after themselves and their immediate families. He goes on to say that in the business world, employees are expected to be self-reliant and display initiative, with hiring and promotion decisions based on merit or evidence of what one has done or can do. (Hofstede, 2010) There is nothing inherently wrong with being individualistic. After all, in his most famous work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith offers a timeless economic perspective: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Truly, the greatest driving force of the economy and indeed the most efficient is an innate self-interest to grow ones wealth. It is through this simple market mechanism driven by self-love and self-interest that the economy can and has grown to what it is today; had the American economy or any economy tried anything different, it would never have grown to its current monolithic size. The question to explore however, is the importance and relevance of said enduring idea in contemporary society via an comparable analysis with other non-individualistic countries. Singapore receives only a score of 20 out of 100 for individualism, on the same report, almost 77% lower than the score that US received and ranked 39th out of 41 countries. (Hofstede, 2010) Yet it would be difficult to argue that Singapore has been performing any less spectacularly than what the US had achieved in the short span of 48 years since it she achieved independence. Singapore is correctly and strongly dubbed a collectivist society, the polar opposite of individualism, where a clear emphasis is placed on the team spirit and a subordination of ones needs to the wholes greater good. A famous Chinese idiom encapsulates the ideology: . The idiom literally means sacrificing ones self for the completion of the goals of the larger body, and a Singaporean who places his needs above others is considered amoral, a misfit, or social deviant. (Craig, 1994)

Businesses in Singapore, not including MNCs that bring with them the culture of the countries from which they came from, are typically very characteristically close-knit and team-oriented. It is not uncommon to see companies going for team building activities such as Dragon Boating, joining the Outward Bound School (OBS) for weekend courses, weekend retreats, and more informally it is not uncommon to see employees from the same company occupying a large table of 10 to enjoy lunch together. It is simply part of our heritage and tradition to be collectivistic, with its roots tracing to our upbringing and the predominantly Chinese culture. (Liu, 2007) An ability to work independently is valued, but an ability to work synergistically in a team is prized. Singaporeans have the ability to function competently in their individual roles, but there is a clear preference for people to be working harmoniously and an innate desire to be on good terms with one another. (Liu, 2007) While a collectivistic culture has fostered harmonious working relationships which may or may not have been the cause of our stellar economic growth, a culture as such inadvertently fosters a groupthink mentality at times where a desire for conformity results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. This phenomenon is less common in the higher hierarchies of the top companies, but one may argue that those top spots are typically occupied by foreign expatriates who bring with them their own culture and work ethics. Another key complaint, or admittance, of the Singaporean government, is the somewhat lacking creativity or entrepreneurial spirit of our people. While the individualistic culture of America has given us the technology giants from the Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship is still oft frowned upon by the older generations in Singapore as non-conforming and an unsafe career path, revealing a preference for stable career paths such as banking, or medicine. In the famous words of Kiyosaki, In America, if you work for a large company for a long time, people ask why. In Singapore, if people leave a large company, people ask why. This is a huge difference. (Kiyosaki, 2011) This has resulted in a dense population of highly intelligent, capable and educated youths, few of which delve into the arts and even less who venture into entrepreneurship. In light of such a climate, our Prime Minister has called for our youths to bravely venture across Singapore shores, to seek fortunes abroad, to expand our horizons and do our nation proud. (Lee, 2011) One cannot help but draw a parallel to the mission of the Virginia Company of London of 1607, but contemplate the actual effect those inspiring words had on our youths. As with everything in life, moderation is key. I believe there are synergies to be harnessed from a less individualistic, more collectivistic, team-oriented structure in America which allows her to tap on her highly diverse and multi-ethnic labour force, leveraging on the unique and distinct traits and qualities each individual bring to the table. In the increasingly globalized world we live in today, businesses cannot afford to remain individualistic. Countries, which do so at their own peril, will no doubt see their competitors gaining on their previously unassailable leads and in no time, surpass them. It thus becomes imperative for America to find unity in individualism; indeed, unity is as far removed as possible from individualism, but unity in individualism is not an oxymoron, unity and individualism are not mutually exclusive, and to strike the delicate balance in between is Americas most imperative task today.

Bibliography
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