Raised in a culture of extreme social competition and individual perfection, young workers have internalized neoliberal capitalism and are demonstrating its most disruptive effects in the workplace, Aiden Cyr writes.
The future success of non-profit organizations rests on leaders who can foster resilient workplace cultures and remain grounded in their missions. Shocks to Canadian communities like economic insecurity, political polarization, and climate change all require strong collective responses from a sector dedicated to improving social outcomes. Yet a great distraction to collective focus on these challenges is happening inside non-profit workplaces, as “hyper-individuality” entrenches itself in the attitudes of employees. Of particular concern is how hyper-individuality has been internalized by young workers, who, raised in a culture of extreme social competition and individual perfection, are now demonstrating its most disruptive effects in the workplace.
Hyper-individuality is a worldview characterized by those who internalize the culture of neoliberal capitalism. It is the overemphasis of self-interested competition and meritocracy that connects educational and professional achievement, status, and wealth with innate personal value. Others have chosen to call this “a culture of perfectionism,” and it’s a growing problem among younger generations, particularly affecting professionals between the ages of 18 and 30. Psychological survey evidence shows that “over the last 27 years perfectionism has greatly increased among American, Canadian, and British college students.” The authors suggest this is “most likely because society has become more individualistic, materialistic, and socially antagonistic.” They conclude that “young people now face more competitive environments, more unrealistic expectations, and more anxious and controlling parents than generations before.”
The consequences of younger generations being raised to internalize hyper-individualist and perfectionist values have begun showing themselves through increases in mental health difficulties. Studies have found significant connections between perfectionism and anxiety and depression, “pathological worry,” and increased sensitivity to criticism and failure. Similarly, there is strong evidence that internalized perfectionist expectations can lead to behavioural disruptions such as “hostility, the tendency to blame others, [and] lower altruism, compliance, and trust.”
Studies have found significant connections between perfectionism and anxiety and depression, ‘pathological worry,’ and increased sensitivity to criticism and failure.
Sector leaders, who spoke to me on background for this article, told me that unrealistic expectations, entitlement, and a lack of cooperation are growing problems for those managing younger staff members. Many feel unable or reluctant to engage in emotionally intense conversations with young workers on things like promotion timelines, idealistic takes on activist orientations at work, and workplace responsibilities for emotional care and mental health. On the other hand, my experience as a youth who works with other young workers in the sector tells me that many young people feel uninvolved in decision-making and feel that work is transactional, and even meaningless in the face of global crises like climate change or armed conflict. Often, this intergenerational conflict has been blamed on an older generation unwilling to radically tilt toward a social justice orientation. Alternatively, an older generation can conclude that young workers don’t have the ethics, social skills, or wherewithal necessary to practically bring about systemic change.
Hyper-individuality manifested in the workplace: Attachment to title
Tensions with young workers are already disrupting non-profit workplaces. Several non-profit leaders across Canada told me that young workers are more likely to have extreme attachment to individual identity, including an unhealthy attachment to title. One leader described a growing trend of employees being unhappy with their role title and function within a few short months of starting a new job. Another referred to “job title inflation” as part of a flurry of accommodation expectations among their youngest workers, who expect a senior-sounding job title without taking on the greater responsibility implied in the title.
A survey of Gen-Z professionals by Robert Walters Canada found the following:
- 51% of Gen Zs expect annual promotion
- 45% of young workers do not see managing someone else as an indicator of seniority
- there’s been a more than 50% increase in senior-sounding job titles in the past year in Toronto for employees with as little as two years’ experience
- 73% of employers claim Gen Z lacks critical soft skills (communication, relationship management, rapport building, and collaborative working)
Unlike their older peers, the study found, “Gen Z’s no longer want to be a cog in a bigger machine – they want to be the machine.” After all, as Martin Fox of Robert Walters explains, “expectations around job-title inflation are due to a values shift among younger workers who care more about having their ideas and entrepreneurial mindsets valued.”
Studies have shown that job title is explicitly related to social status and worker identity. Hyper-individuality and the accelerating tendency to be dissatisfied with job role and title at the early career level are a challenge to non-profits with limited resources that don’t want to lose employees or limit leadership opportunities. According to sociologist Jeffrey Lucas, employees whose job titles do come with additional responsibility or which are perceived by others to be important “display greater satisfaction, commitment and performance, and lower turnover intentions.” If this is not the case, however, then attachment to title functions only as a status or identity shortcut.
Prioritizing building a workplace culture of belonging and purpose can serve as an important antidote.
This social need for inclusion and recognition can be more meaningfully fulfilled by a workplace culture of belonging and purpose, which research shows improves everything from “job-satisfaction and self-esteem to performance and wellbeing.” In fact, one study showed that “employee perceptions of inclusion, belonging uncertainty, and belonging at work were the strongest predictors of turnover intentions, burnout and work-life balance.”
Prioritizing building a workplace culture of belonging and purpose can serve as an important antidote. An especially exciting opportunity for non-profits exists here, as the ability to communicate a strong social purpose is already essential for non-profit fundraising and program delivery. Being able to authentically communicate that purpose within your workplace only strengthens the fabric of the workplace community and is clearly crucial for the successful anchoring of young and incoming employees. Meaningful opportunities for workplace support include mentorship and continuously evolving your workplace’s inclusion strategy.
False solidarity and anti-collaboration attitudes
In “Building Resilient Organizations,” Maurice Mitchell writes that young professionals “newer to the work” have downloaded a belief system that over-exaggerates the role of one’s personal identity in advancing social causes. He contends that rigid interpretations of personal identity should not be taken as justification or validity for an organizational direction or a political position. In my experience, non-profit workplaces in Canada have yet to invoke this critical rule.
Non-profit leaders and managers I spoke with described a reticence to push back on the beliefs of young workers who maintain that personal identity based on race, gender, or membership in a marginalized community alone entitles them to openly dissent from organizational decision-making. Routinely defaulting to personal identity is extremely reductive and closes space for authentic and critical dialogue on important decisions. When workers proclaim that their identity has explanatory power, it should always be met with the understanding that someone else who shares that identity might feel entirely different about that same decision. Without this understanding, the elevation of diverse voices and relationship-building is replaced by either overburdening members of a marginalized community with impossible workloads or delaying collective action on urgent issues.
Assuming, for example, that the perspective of a single Indigenous person can dutifully inform the scope of an organization’s reconciliation policy is reckless. Advancing reconciliation sits with the entire organization, not simply those with an Indigenous identity. Therefore, working with non-Indigenous employees to create a plan with the help of the Indigenous community, academics, and professionals is more appropriate. This is the opposite of performative inclusion as it encourages education, curiosity, and shared ownership of both the problem and solution. A healthy, resilient workplace culture can benefit, for instance, by exposing non-Indigenous community members to immediate Indigenous community needs rather than stepping away from the hard work altogether.
Instead of being vulnerable, or seeking authentic connection with historically oppressed groups, organizations are increasingly content to ‘placate or pander instead of being in a right relationship, which requires struggle, debate, disagreement, and hard work.’
Mitchell further contends that “genuflecting to individuals solely based on their socialized identities or personal stories deprives them of the conditions that sharpen arguments, develop skills, and win debates.” Doing so is part of a growing infantilization of marginalized community members, or “false solidarity.” Instead of being vulnerable, or seeking authentic connection with historically oppressed groups, organizations are increasingly content to “placate or pander instead of being in a right relationship, which requires struggle, debate, disagreement, and hard work.” Ultimately, race, gender, or membership in a marginalized community is “far too broad a container” to be an unquestionably reliable indicator of a good decision, strategy, or leader, according to Mitchell. To create effective responses to issues such as climate change, reconciliation, or economic inequality, the collective pressure on systems change will have to be a stronger force than hyper-individuality currently allows.
What can you do about it? Organizations can focus on ensuring that individuals clearly understand their place as part of their workplace’s identity or culture. When hiring, organizations can rigorously evaluate whether an employee’s personal theory of change, and the practical steps to seeing that change through, aligns with the organization’s beliefs. If not, hyper-individuality will continue to cut at collective identity and weaken workplace culture, group dynamics, and strategy.
Anti-leadership attitudes and activism
Instituting sweeping policy changes around inclusivity has been necessary for the modern non-profit workplace, which far too often privileged the same voices and was not accountable to the diversity it was meant to serve. Unfortunately, today we see the consequences of an overcorrection. We have moved from the over-concentration of power in the hands of the few toward a new philosophy where we privilege individual power above collective responsibility.
We have moved from the over-concentration of power in the hands of the few toward a new philosophy where we privilege individual power above collective responsibility.
One core issue is that hyper-individuality empowers the group’s loudest voice or the one most resistant to collaboration. This is neatly showcased in a story of intergenerational tension described in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two experienced leaders involved with a “get youth on boards” initiative detailed how the youth they worked with had an “obsession with creating safe spaces that are anything but safe for a dissenter.” They described how a difference of opinion on how to implement social justice reached a boiling point. The young workers characterized disagreements with older colleagues as harmful, oppressive, and rooted in a power imbalance. Both parties recognized the importance of social justice but had differing opinions on how to get there. The conflict stemmed from youth wanting the organization’s purpose to be “taking on harmful systems of power,” whereas the older generations wanted the primary purpose to remain getting “youth integrated into decision-making roles in our society.” The result was a failure to collaborate.
The young leaders involved in this scenario demonstrate the extension of a work conflict to an attack on personal identity by characterizing disagreements as personal attacks. When ideas and beliefs are irrefutable extensions of one’s own identity it breaks down the ability to have difficult conversations openly and to build the necessary trust among co-workers to address collective challenges. In the hyper-individualistic orientation, employers and executives are at risk of being labelled “oppressive” for possessing more power than their staff and guilty of desensitizing a word that should be reserved for egregious rights violations. This discomfort with power and leadership only serves to undercut the impact of good community work.
Advancing activism is inherently about placing individual interests and comfort aside for the collective interest.
Advancing activism is inherently about placing individual interests and comfort aside for the collective interest. However, the trend among some young workers is to blithely use “activist culture” as a defence for an undisciplined approach to advancing collective strategy. That can mean criticizing a process as non-inclusive without forwarding a solution. I’ve heard colleagues equate organizational hierarchy to oppression. I’ve heard others advocate for “flat hierarchy,” without determining how that would improve impact. Idealistic and activist takes on non-profit organization form and function explained through the lens of hyper-individuality explains how some might be using this terminology for temporary feelings of individual empowerment, resulting in more virtue signalling than the creation of a collective good.
Conclusion
Left unresolved, hyper-individuality will continue to manifest in disruptive ways that go beyond attachment to title, false solidarity, and anti-leadership attitudes. It’s a tension that can hamper organizational unity and ultimately weaken the sector’s institutional memory and collective momentum toward necessary systems-level change. Generational workforce turnover will continue to be disruptive if the sector does not work to resist hyper-individuality among its workers. Leaders can do this by revising their workplace culture policies with a focus on resilience, developing improved intergenerational communication, dedicating significantly more resources to mentorship and onboarding programs for young workers, and focusing on collective – not just personal – well-being as an important pillar of their mental health strategies.
Society’s obsession with competition and perfectionist expectations are not unique to Gen Z or other young professionals between 18 and 30 years old. We should be quick to avoid generational stereotyping and instead note that the workplace’s youngest professionals are uniquely experiencing hyper-individuality’s worst effects. Ultimately, responsibility for this rests with a society that places extreme value on individual thought, identity, and comfort, with little weight on the value and accountability expectations that come with membership in a community.
This is the first piece from Aiden Cyr, one of five writing fellows working with The Philanthropist Journal. The fellowship is focused on the future of work and working and was made possible through funding and support from the Workforce Funder Collaborative.
