Why you need to avoid conformity in your workplace

If you want a company that pulses with creative, engaged employees, you need to avoid rigid roles and let them to assert their individuality.

Fostering diversity in your workplace is key to running a smart, innovative, and productive company. But diversity in race, religious creeds, and sexual orientation is only part of what a successful business needs.

Your company needs to allow employees to be themselves--unique individuals with a range of perspectives, talents, and skills that help them accomplish great things. If you are looking for a polished, rigid employee who can be easily typecast into a specific role, you're going about hiring and running a business all wrong.

Rob Goffee, professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, and Gareth Jones, visiting professor at the IE Business School in Madrid, write in Harvard Business Review about how developing conformity hurts companies.

Goffee and Jones studied a range of businesses that support "self-expression, individuality, and diverse experience" in their employees and leaders. Workplaces that support individual authenticity have higher employee engagement, they found, which in turn improves the customer experience, drives creativity, and helps create a pipeline of leaders growing within the company. Read more on inc.com