The curse of individualism in organisational thinking

We might expect to see the very best leadership practice and thinking on display in militaries. After all, soldiers, sailors, and aviators are renowned for their proficiency, coordination, and willingness to sacrifice their own personal safety for the sake of mission. And yet, in our experience teaching leadership and organisational behaviour to seasoned military officers, we find that they are very often unaware of some important fundamentals of human behaviour, and can be outright resistant to the most robust social science of leadership.

There is a specific encumbrance that we come up against, year after year: strong gravitation toward leadership narratives that centre on the presumptive leader. Meanwhile, messages about the importance of organisational cultures, or the agency and sophistication of followers, are met with suspicion and unease. Our recent paper 'Burying the great man' described how leadership in the Australian Military is sustained by traditions and habits that are woven into the DNA of that military, not by the best modern thinking about military leadership. 

Helpfully, just this year, the psychologists Alex Haslam, Mats Alvesson and Steve Reicher put a name to this problem: zombie leadership. Zombie leadership is the persistent, and unfailingly individualistic, set of misconceptions about leadership that seemingly have not been killed by rigorous empirical research or theory. 

In this article, we hope to tackle a key driver of the popularity of individualistic notions of leadership and organisational behaviour: the limiting individualistic metatheory that pervades mainstream organisational psychology. Our grave concern as both educators and practitioners is that this metatheory is stopping people from truly understanding the psychology that drives their own and others' behaviour at work.

Introducing individualistic metatheory

The term metatheory describes the loosely organised beliefs and values that shape the construction and critique of scientific theories. They consist of unstated assumptions, identification of certain problems, and approved modes of discourse.

In the context of psychology, an individualistic metatheory is where the individual human is privileged with respect to those assumptions, problematisation, and discourses. This privileging of the individual can take range forms, including:

1. Ontological – The individual human is more real than collectives or societies; think former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's claim that 'there is no such thing as society'.
2. Aetiological – Qualities of the individual human have more impact than collectives or societies; for example, lauding the predictive power of instincts or personality.
3. Moral – Individual capacities and virtue are corrupted by collectives or societies; as seen in the thesis that humans in groups are more irrational, violent, and animalistic.

These notions are so omnipresent and ingrained in psychology, and indeed much of society, that it is perhaps hard to imagine what the alternatives look like. As the Eastern adage goes, a fish doesn't know it's in water.

But there are alternatives. Since the dawn of modern psychology scholars have urged us to think more deeply about these three flavours of individualism.

The alternatives to individualism

William James took aim at ontological individualism in the hugely impactful 19th century text The Principles of Psychology. James appreciated that one analytical lens holds no inherent truth status over another (e.g. the molecular structure of water is not more real than its thirst-quenching qualities, or vice versa). Applied to the person, he writes on how the continuity of the individual, including our own sense of personal identity, is not a special truth. Rather, our sense of self should be recognised as a particular interpretation of experience. By not reifying the individual, James was able to reap the analytic value of seeing people as multifaceted and given meaning by social relations: 'we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons whose opinion he cares'.

In terms of the aetiological, or causal, in 1931 Kurt Lewin implored psychologists to graduate from Aristotelian essentialism to Galilean dynamism. The former is concerned chiefly with ostensibly perpetual characteristics of individuals, while the latter attends to the ongoing variability of the individual's total system. The cost of the Aristotelian approach is to exclude most observations from analysis, leaving an impoverished and largely re-descriptive psychology. This is, of course, the chief and ongoing concern of the misleadingly labelled individual difference literature. That literature reduces the complexity of the individual in their social context to point estimates on a handful of scales, yielding modest predictive power at best. Much of behavioural genetics can also be put in this basket; too often individual genetics is isolated from context, leading to dramatic overstatements of genetic heritability.

Finally, there is the aforementioned belief in the superior rationality, conscience, and accountability of the individual vs. the crowd; a view championed by the world's most famous psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud. Freud's enthusiasm to disparage the crowd caused him to miss the crucial important question: what is an individual without the collective? Shortly after the Second World War, Elton Mayo, father of the human relations school of thought, sought to remind us that such a creature would be barely human at all, robbed of all that grants our species our true strength: language, cultural knowledge, and cooperation. And how are those assets gifted? Through the psychology of group membership and empathy. As Johan Asland later wrote, 'Man has a remarkable capacity of taking the role of the other. His humanity resides in just this capacity'.

How individualistic metatheory does its work

A metatheory serves as a filter, screening what is sensible and plausible from that which is illogical or far-fetched. Because metatheory is both loosely structured and multifaceted, it is also robust against any one particular challenge.

For instance, tough questions might be raised about the inherent immoral influence of groups (e.g. by findings that deindividuation can fuel prosocial and antisocial behaviour equally). However, this needn't have any impact on ontological or etiological facets of individualism, leaving the broader metatheory by-and-large unharmed. The metatheory can thus continue to filter out any less potent challenges to the primacy of the individual. This grants moral individualism, like the limb of a starfish, the time and opportunity to regrow and rejoin its brethren. Because individualistic metatheory is self-perpetuating and can heal its own wounds, it acts as a powerful immune response to countervailing ideas.

Metatheory is self-justifying, which adds to its resilience. Haslam and colleagues are correct to say that individualist metatheory is a boon to those who hold positions of power and privilege. One should not, however, think of individualism as a calculated choice of organisational elites. While probably true on occasion, it is also true that an established metatheory is simply the 'natural' way to view people and psychology. Individualistic metatheory is advanced and defended by elites and non-elites alike.

Individualistic metatheory does, though, sustain organisational behaviour myths that should have been left behind decades ago, leading to damaging organisational behaviour misattributions. Returning to our sphere of work, the Australian military continues to very effectively enculturate members into its ranks. It uses various forms of military-identity, including local level unit identity, to fuel high-performance and commitment. When it comes to attributions of success, however, we see consistent gravitation to perspectives that lionise successful superiors and implicitly de-value the crucial collective psychology at play.

Among the most popular are the charismatic, authenticity, and personality perspectives on leadership. That popularity persists despite the fact that good data suggests that charisma and authenticity are better understood as outcomes of collective psychology, not individual attributes. And, of course, so-called leadership personality traits have long been known to differ across organisational contexts, including in military settings.

The downstream impact of leadership individualism is to see some superiors seduced into caustic egocentric leadership practice, while others adopt an unduly narrow and exclusionary picture of what military leadership looks like. Individualistic leadership analyses also hamper attempts to properly understand organisational failures (e.g. recent and tragic deviance among crucial military units).

At the same time, myths given mileage by individualism further divert organisations from effective behaviour practice. Needs hierarchies, like Maslow's for instance, may be some of the most derailing and damaging ideas to ever come out of psychology. The notion that humans are most motivated to meet so-called 'safety' or 'physiological' needs means that the enculturation and belonging that drives employee commitment and wellbeing are seen as fringe factors. Meanwhile, carrot and stick management is presumed to be the bedrock of organisational performance, when if anything the opposite is true.

Malsow's view should be a non-starter. It flies in the face of everyday observation (adventure sports is but one obvious example), and even the most superficial reflection on military history will reveal countless examples of willingness, and even enthusiasm, to put personal wellbeing second to mission and team.

In fact, in posthumously published writing, Maslow himself urged more scrutiny and scepticism of his theory. And while important critiques have long been available (e.g. that the pursuit of any need, including safety and physiological, will be a variable expression of culture), the individualistic take on human motivation prevails. It continues to be uncritically delivered into academies, doctrine, and management textbooks. 

Breaking the curse

Economics Nobel prize winner George Akerlof stated that the social identity approach to leadership, which we have so heavily leveraged in our own work, 'seems so very right that it may come as a surprise that it is not already the concept of leadership everywhere.'  Why is it not? The answer is individualistic metatheory.

Among both academics and practitioners, individualistic metatheory determines which ideas get traction and which don't. It is trapping us in a narrow, and likely erroneous, conception of how people function in organisational settings. To escape that prison, the prisoners must first see the bars.

John Turner and Kate Reynolds recognised over 20 years ago that social identity ideas will thrive or wither depending on the metatheoretical lens that is applied. Their message should be widely applied: an appreciation of psychological metatheory is not an option. If one wishes to access all that social scientific research has to offer, engaging with metatheory is a must.

At the bare minimum this will mean ensuring that any teaching in psychology or organisational behaviour is accompanied by an introduction to the metatheoretical schisms that have such ongoing impact on these fields. Introductory textbooks in management and leadership should do the same.

Really, it falls to all of us who trade in the ideas of organisational psychology to get comfortable talking about metatheory and helping others understand its profound impact on theory and practice.

A bitter pill

In our view, metatheory has been avoided, not because it is complicated, but because it is inconvenient. It is inconvenient to those who wish to skip over metatheoretical debates and portray organisational psychology, or psychology in general, as more coherent and unified than it really is. Said otherwise, metatheory is a thorn to those who wish to portray the field as an advanced science, when it is not.

We have a choice. We can engage in that pretence, and watch again and again the dismay of those who scratch the surface of organisational psychology to find a science full of rifts, contradictions, and trivialities. Or, more commonly, watch people put undue faith in fads and pop-science that are legitimised by a slick and artificial version of organisational psychology.

Alternatively, we can be up-front that organisational psychology as an enterprise is still working toward its philosophical and theoretical foundation. Yes, this will re-open wounds that many would wish away, but we believe that this is the only way for organisational psychology to find its footing as a science and live up to its promise.

If we don't now, then in another century we will still be squabbling at the edges of organisational psychology, no closer to a unified science as William James observed 130 years ago: 'How often the battles of psychology have to be fought over again, each time with heavier armies and bigger trains, though not always with such able generals!'

Andrew Frain completed his PhD in social psychology at the Australian National University. His research interests centre on the social identity approach and science integrity, with particular interest in research translation.

Nick Jans' career began conventionally enough, with the Royal Military College (Duntroon) followed by regimental service in Vietnam. But after that it was distinctively unconventional, as he rotated between internal consultancy, research and policy roles, all guided by the longstanding principle that 'There is nothing as practical as a good theory'. After 25 years of regular service, he then spent nearly as long in the Reserves. In the meantime, after a few years at the University of Canberra, he moved to full-time consultancy.