Why Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War 997

You seem to have read something into my post that wasn't at all what I meant.

In many recent situations I have seen managers who do not manage at all, and who openly rationalize this as "not handholding." In these same shops employees openly hoard information and do not cooperate because there is no management pressure for anything except scheduled delivery. Management often fosters this lack of cooperation by instilling distrust through excessive secrecy and sets employees against one another out of insecurity, encouraging blame shifting and carrying tales. Employees are not empowered with the resources and delegated power to act independently.

There's a big difference between what I (and evidently you as well) would consider "not babysitting" and a total abrogation of management responsibilities, encouraging workers to compete against one another with no coherent goal while the manager takes credit for any success and blames all failure on the employees.

This seems commonplace in the US today. It's one reason why NASA has so many problems.

I had perhaps misunderstood what others meant by "individualist" as I have seldom seen that term used in the corporate workplace setting.

Evidently you interpret it to describe people who can take ownership of issues and follow through.

To many people, the term "individualist" in the workplace connotes an inability to cooperate effectively, insecurity, blame shifting and information hoarding, not the desirable traits above.

In the context of an earlier post, I had taken the term to mean essentially the notion of an individual completing an entire development project completely independently, with no management buttistance and no cooperation with other employees, something which is impossible in the context of large software projects.

Thus, the term is somewhat confusing.

Indeed, it is questionable whether the philosophical terms of individualism and collectivism or communitarianism are readily applicable to the corporate workplace, which typically reflects a compromise between them.