RCRG
Syndicate
] "Leaders will do well to think of a team as a collection of diverse individuals, each with his or her own unique character and potential for contribution to the group. Being expected to conform and to subjugate individual needs and desires for the common good is degrading to team members. The fact is that some people are more comfortable as part of a group than others. Some more independent members may feel constrained and ill at ease working in a team. Others, because of their race, sex, age, religion, or culture, may not have much in common with other members and yet feel pressured to get along and conform. An effective leader is sensitive to the need to preserve individual dignity, to capitalize on differences, and to not try to achieve conformity."
Loss of Creativity
"The delegitimation of one's sense of what is important gives rise to a special case of the ritualization of work--the loss of creativity. Schein (1983) describes the condition of 'conformity' that follows from an insistence by the organization that all of its norms be accepted as being equally important. Under that condition, the individual 'can tune in so completely on what he sees to be the way others are handling themselves that he becomes a carbon-copy and sometimes a caricature of them.' Consequently, Schein notes: 'The conforming individual curbs his creativity and thereby moves the organization toward a sterile form of bureaucracy.' " (p. 63)
"But first you will have to see that it is impossible to be like everyone else and still be your own person. Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this better than anyone I've ever read. In Self-Reliance he said.
'Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.' " (p. 72)