Impact of individualism and collectivism on social policy?

Individualism versus collectivism. Individualism refers to a loosely knit social organization in which each person values his or her own worth and needs and relies on individual effort for his or her own benefit. Collectivism, on the other hand, refers to a tightly knit social organization in which all individuals tend to distinguish between being within and outside the group, expecting to be taken care of by those within the group, but in return maintaining absolute loyalty to the group. The relationship between individualism and collectivism represents a society's view of individual power. In collectivist societies, employees feel a sense of loyalty and allegiance to the organization, and tend to work in favor of group effort and collective rewards. In collectivist societies, it is considered a virtue to belong to the organization and obtain membership. Therefore, we believe that collectivist societies are more likely to create harmonious relationships between employees and managers. Individualistic societies, on the other hand, tend to favor the supremacy of the individual. Therefore, individualistic societies are better suited to adopt a reward system based on employee performance.

Traditional Chinese culture supports the idea of collectivism, and employees have an emotional attachment to the organization, which should make it easy to build a harmonious relationship between employees and managers. However, Chinese culture also supports a relatively large power distance and a potential conflict between the powerful and the powerless, which in turn is not conducive to the formation of a cordial relationship between employees and managers. Due to the existence of these two opposing indicators, the appropriateness of adopting the humanistic policy of "building harmonious relationships between employees and managers" depends on the manager's operational skills, i.e., how to maximize the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in order to achieve the management objectives. In this regard, collectivism should be strongly advocated in enterprises, so that it dominates the values of employees and managers, and the negative impact of hierarchical concepts should be minimized. That is to say, attention should be paid to the way of equal distribution of power and rank among employees, and the implementation of the system of slow promotion according to the seniority and contribution of employees. In this way, the negative effects of large power distances are accommodated within the positive effects brought about by the spirit of collectivism. On the contrary, motivational tools that overemphasize individual freedom and personal achievement, and therefore develop personal competition among employees and reward individual performance, may not necessarily yield good results.

It is worth noting that traditional Chinese culture is more supportive of "collectivism" based on blood ties, and therefore "egalitarianism" in the distribution of power and benefits in family-owned businesses is largely more likely to lead to managerial success in China.

Because of the influence of traditional Chinese thinking, which emphasizes prophecy over analysis, people always want to answer questions about the future from their experience and are reluctant to analyze more y. At the same time, the "top-only" mentality makes the leader's personal experience decisive at this time. However, the individual experience will be subject to the social environment, values, stereotypes and other factors, while things are in constant development and change, if the past experience is always used to guide future actions, the analysis itself is bound to be incomplete, and due to the subjective empiricism of the decision makers, these analyses are only the embellishment of the entire decision-making process, which undoubtedly lead to decision-making irrationalization.

From the point of view of decision-making efficiency, and in the whole decision-making process, the smoothness of information exchange is an important guarantee of decision-making efficiency. The characteristic of traditional Chinese culture which emphasizes on sentimentality will lead to the non-rationalization of information exchange. In the Chinese decision-making group, information communication is a top-down one-way chain structure, except for individual private informal communication, there is little feedback information, which objectively creates the difficulty of obtaining sufficient information for the decision-making subjects at the lower level, and at the same time, because the managers know that they have a small role to play in the decision-making, they do not have the subjective initiative to go up to the active concern and efforts. Therefore, the information inequality and non-closed-loop structure brought about by this traditional culture not only affects the scientific nature of decision-making, but also slows down the time of decision-making and implementation. Obviously, in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) where the business environment is slow to change, traditional Chinese culture has a better supportive role, while in enterprises with complex and changing business environments and larger scales, a collective decision-making system must be adopted to improve the quality and efficiency of decision-making.