Why the Trouble Working with Others when I Can Handle This Alone?
There’s always been a misconception associating individualism with terms like “self-serving” or “disobey”. Such misconception describes individualism as incompatible with teamwork.
Individualism & Interdependent Individualism
To clarify the false understanding, we must first understand individualism itself. American culture is greatly influenced by individualism. According to social psychology, individualism refers to a philosophy of life stressing the priority of individual needs over group needs, a preference for loosely knit social relationships, and a desire to be relatively autonomous of others’ influence. However, when it comes to social interaction, we see the emergency of an interdependent individualism nowadays.
In interpersonal relationships, especially teamwork, those with traits of individualism know their own minds and are willing to act on their convictions, thus making the strongest, most dependable commitments. Therefore, we should consider individualists as those we can count on rather than as loners.
See from a New Perspective
People may say, “Well, I just prefer doing things alone. I don’t have to compromise or reconcile.” The truth is that, we are compromising every single day. As long as there are choices to be made, we are giving up one thing to get another. When you make the choice of not teaming up with others, you give up the potential opportunities for new perspectives, more information, social connection and so on.
Quite the opposite of our topic, I have always prefer doing things alone, especially when it comes to academic field. In my opinion, everyone has their own thoughts and it is incredibly hard, if not impossible, to find a balanced place that satisfies everyone. But immersed in this kind of thinking, I ignored how important those different opinions are to broaden my horizon. Take a simple example, in my college class, my professor asked about which soft skills we considered important in the workplace. I thought it was so easy that I could effortlessly come up with five in one second. But when others started to share the most important soft skills in their opinions and explaining the reasons, it dawned on me that it is never about how competent I am, or how fast and perfectly I can finish a task, but the perspectives of others’. I heard skills I could never think of, such as humor. But after the explanation I adopted such an opinion. This kind of experience is something working alone can never attain.
Conclusion
Team-working is a new form of interdependent individualism. Today we discussed the relationship between individualism and cooperation and why we might need teamwork with a simple example from my personal experience. Next post we are going to discover a thorough methodology on how to team work exactly and experiment on myself to see if it really works.
