Individualism vs. Collectivism--Maximising Creativity

When considering the problem of a sustainable future, the problem of overpopulation often comes up. My view is that earth suffers not so much from overpopulation, as it does from under-creativity. It is quite possible for the earth to support many times the number of humans presently alive, in a sustainable manner, if the humans were creative enough to adopt sustainable methods.

Recent UC Berkeley research suggests that a culture of individualism may be a powerful force for creativity, in the research environment.

“The message of this article is that diversity of ideas and perspectives is crucial for innovation,” says Staw, who has been studying creativity for 15 years.

Staw and Goncalo’s findings are the latest rally in a fierce academic debate over how culture relates to innovation. Other professors have argued that a strong and collectivistic culture – one that is more team-oriented and emphasizes organization-wide goals – may improve creativity when the firm has set widely accepted goals for innovation. They cite Hewlett-Packard and 3M as examples.

Staw, chairman of the Haas Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group, disagrees. “A strong corporate culture can be detrimental to innovation because everyone has to get on board and be relatively alike,” says Staw, also the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Professor in Leadership and Communication.

On the other hand, the advantages of an individualistic culture may be especially salient when innovation is an explicit goal, Staw and Goncalo hypothesize in their article. They define an individualistic culture as one that values uniqueness, encourages people to be independent from the group, and provides clear recognition for individual achievement.

To test this hypothesis, Staw and Goncalo conducted a one-hour experiment with teams of undergraduate students. First, participants completed a survey designed to prime a collectivistic or individualistic mindset. Then each group was instructed to be either creative or practical as they spent 15 minutes generating as many ideas as possible about how to solve a problem.

The problem was figuring out a new business for a space vacated by a mismanaged and low-quality restaurant at a major West Coast University. In the final phase, each group was asked to select the idea that they believed was either the most creative or practical.

“On every measure, individualistic groups were more creative than collectivistic groups when instructed to be so – generating more ideas, presenting a greater number of ideas that depart from the pre-existing solution (i.e. restaurants), and posing ideas that were judged to be more novel,” the authors found. “The results simply show that, when creativity is explicitly desired, individualism will serve to facilitate such performance.”

Individualistic groups instructed to be more creative generated significantly more ideas (37.4 ideas on average) than collectivistic groups told to be creative (26.1 ideas on average). Collectivistic groups instructed to be creative generated significantly more restaurant ideas as a percentage of total ideas generated (14%) than individualistic groups (7%) given the same instructions to be creative.

And on a creativity scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most creative, ideas from individualistic groups instructed to be creative were more creative (with an average rating of 3.03) than those generated by collectivistic groups (with an average rating of 2.83).

The upshot of this research is that companies should protect individual perspectives, Staw says.

“Organizations try to hire people who fit with the culture, but organizations should instead look for people who are different,” he says. “Nurturing individualistic perspectives is better than having a corporate-wide direction,” Staw adds.

However, Staw notes that U.S. businesses have increasingly emphasized team projects and have long been interested in Asian business practices, which are known for their cooperative atmosphere. “This study raises a red flag because the U.S. has had a very individualistic culture, but as we’re moving more toward team-based organizations, we risk losing some creativity,” he cautions.

Many academics have wondered why the European culture spawned so much scientific and technological innovation from the middle ages on, when other previously fertile cultures such as the Hindu, the Chinese, the Islamic, etc. had grown stagnant, intellectually. (see Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment)

The current university culture in the social and political sciences has downgraded the importance of creativity, and certainly individualism. And many sustainable living theorists abandon creativity in favour of simple-minded population reduction approaches. To these simple thinking theorists, individualism and creativity are enemies--threats to their ability to fully control the down-sizing of population they feel is necessary.

But to more intelligent theorists of greater vision, it is obvious that only human creativity will discover the paths forward to greater sustainability, even in the face of 8 to 10 billion humans living on the earth's surface.

The Berkeley research was oriented toward corporate research institutes, which exist in order to create new products and services to enrich the parent corporation. The same principle applies to creative efforts oriented toward finding sustainable futures that are currently obscured by the uncertainty of the branching future.