Summary: Collectivism In The Workplace

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With the fast-paced growth of globalization, a manager is facing with different ethnicities of employees, be it domestically or oversea. The U.S. culture has always been emphasizing individualism in which each individual is recognized for his achievement and/or contribution in the workplace. This is called social loafing. Conversely, other countries in Europe and Asia might not adapt the individualism as well as the United States. These countries are more for group-based activities, or known as collectivism (Robbins & Judge, 2009). For a manager to successfully motivate the performance of the employees with different cultural backgrounds, he or she might want to balance the social loafing and collectivism among the employees in the group. …show more content…
(Earley, 1989). As a cliché in a team work, there is no “I” in a team. This model of team’s achievement could be clearly seen in entertainment in various shows in Las Vegas. For example, Cirque du Soleil, a show with more than people, has won numerous awards and billion dollars in sales, yet no name of performers was mentioned or credited (Stout, 2012).
Group Performance: Roles, Norms, Status, Size, and Cohesiveness
1) Roles: the position of a person or employee in a group.
2) Norms: the generally the acceptable standards of behavior within a group by the members.
3) Status: differences in status create different orders in a group.
4) Size: depend on projects that determine the size of a group. For groups engaged in problem solving, large groups consistently get better marks than their smaller counterparts.
5) Cohesiveness: the degree to which group members are attracted to each other and are motivated to stay in the group (Stretch,
…show more content…
The employee 's performance is found to decline with group size (Earley, 1989). The larger the group, the less effort would be. Due to the believe that a group 's interest is shared equally among its members, an individual will loaf; therefore, reduce his effort. A large size in a group would also attribute to the low effort from the employees since it is difficult to monitor each individual 's input. In their research on this issue of social loafing, Kerr and Bruun (1983) stated that group performance is varied based on different tasks. In a disjunctive task where performance is crucial in the group members ' participation, most members did not loaf. In a conjunctive tasks in which performance is counted by outputs of all group members, the most capable group members loafed due to the belief that they are

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