Everyone contributed for the sake of themselves and not for the greater good of the company, that is what individualism is.
Individuals are always individualist unless they get lobotomized. The question of governance is how to manipulate that individualism to good ends.
Rats jump ship in an individualistic system, in a collectivist system you expect the rats to sacrifice themselves to save the whole. Managers often tries to sell you on the collective so you work harder and demand less pay, but that is just him as an individual trying to get more out of you that doesn't mean it actually works like a collective.
Or in other words, that is an individualistic organization.
> care about their work quality, and the impact their work has in their colleuges work
Yeah, they care about their own ideals, not the organization itself. They can care about their coworkers, but they don't care about Wallmarts bottomline.
So as you see, this individualistic organization can still draw from the power of human collectivist needs, so you get the best of both worlds, you get the collectivist goodness at small scale and the greed that glues together them and make them power through even when they are too tired to care about the collective.
In any system people have to work to live: food, housing and such cost money. Doing "good" has nithing to do with it, and I never said that. The question is, do you care about more than the monthly pay check for something you pass most of your day doing or not?
What keeps the workers showing up to work is the need to live. What keeps them at a particular place is a myriad of things. Individualism is not part of that.
And why do you go immediately to "remove the pay"? There is quite some territory between working for free and not valueing a sufficient salary above all else.
Funny so, how everybody working in a sector withbstrong labour unions is basically making more, for less hours, on average than those without them. Seems individualism is a great way to devide and conquer for people holding all the power, because once peoole are convinced individualism is better than cooperation, they voluntarily devide themselves.
Lets say an equivalent company with similar culture and people offered twice the salary, how many would say no? People saying yes in that situation are not there for the collective, they are there for their own sake first and foremost. The collective is an afterthought since they abandon it the instant a better opportunity appears.
You can convince people that radically different things are in their self-interest, from joining hands and singing Kumbaya to Genocide.
The notion of self-interest (or I guess in your case individualism, which is even shakier) is an empty vessel you can fill with nearly anything.
No, that isn't the same thing. A collectivist would do things he hates and he doesn't believe in personally because the collective wants him to do it. He would sacrifice himself because the collective told him to. There are many examples of societies and organizations that worked that way, such societies are collective societies.
Military is the most common example, they are often run as a collectivist organization, most soldiers aren't there because they want to or they believe in the war, they are there because they support their country or they were forced to support their country against their will by authoritarian collectivism. And they wouldn't go and support their other country if they were paid more since they are there just to support their country, those are mercenaries.
Our capitalist societies aren't like that at all, we are so individualist that people like you don't even understand what it means to not be individualist. The closest to collectivism in USA wouldn't be corporations, but national anthems, school children saying the pledge, religion etc.
So something like the stock market, as the engine of American capitalism, only works if everybody in your society believes that it is worth taking risks in order to possibly get a huge windfall. But is that really in people's self-interest? Maybe what one would interpret as some kind of natural individual desire is actually a particularly American level of risk tolerance that has been inculcated because it has led to a lot of collective success.
If you mean that humans sometimes do more than the bare minimum, sure they do that. But that is an inherent part of humans, that has nothing to do with individualism or collectivist systems, humans do that in all systems, that is a part of the value of a human worker and why you pay them to work for you.
Because I know people that work there, and money surely isn't the first reason you are teaching a bunch of brats while having parts of the public look down on you if you can easily get double the amount somewhere outside of the field. Same for political work, crowdsourcing, .. People take gratification in doing something that matters to society. Yes, they want to survive, but they are quite often not doing it for the money, the money is a nice bonus and enables to do it full-time, but that is not always the reason you do it.
Also you are goalpost moving, you said first they are only doing it only for themselves not for "the company", and people often do it for the institution that employs them. Not because they are paid, but because they believe they are doing something that matters.
That would apply to those teachers and doctors and nurses as well, almost all of them would gladly abandon their current kids/patients to go help other kids/patients if they were paid twice the salary. That is how we know they aren't there for the collective good of the organization, they just care about doing something good at any place with no feelings for that particular collective.
If you mean that people are helpful etc, then that is a completely different thing from them actually caring enough about a particular organization.