Published on: September 10, 2025 at 3:17 pm
By Nick Keppler
As American and multinational corporations faced the competitiveness of a global market, many tossed aside top-down management and began to embrace collaboration.
“Teamwork and caring can pay healthy dividends in the constrained 1990s and beyond,” stated a 1992 Time magazine article. The CEO of Ford Motor Company bragged that more than 700 employee suggestions went into the Taurus, the strong-selling car model most responsible for dragging Ford out of the financial junkheap.
The article continued, “This apparent New Age emphasis on teamwork and trust is really a homecoming for theories that U.S. companies cold-shouldered—and Japanese managers embraced—when American social scientists first proposed them in the 1950s and ’60s as a key to creating high-quality products.”
The value of all-hands meetings, brainstorming sessions, and corporate retreats are rarely questioned by the companies that employ them, and the sanctity of collaboration is deeply engrained in Silicon Valley, with its laidback, campus-quad-style workplace atmospheres.
Companies should recognize that teamwork can also be a burden, and some situations call for independent, autonomous contemplation, said Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University.
“I think for a long time, teams were seen as this general panacea,” Byron said.
“Wherever the genesis of that idea might have come from, it has entered into the vernacular in a way that just defies what we know about teams.”
“Frankly, teamwork is difficult,” she added. “It takes longer. It requires more coordination. There are opportunities for conflict.”’
Resolving issues as a team is valuable for big-picture goals that naturally create interdependence of the people working towards them, Byron has found in her research.
“There are times when you need to structure work into teams,” Byron said. “There’s no single person who could ever probably develop a new car, for example.
“You need, for example, safety engineers to say, ‘What makes a vehicle safer?’ and people in marketing to say, ‘What do consumers want?’ and others to answer different questions,” she said.
“You need all these different people with these different areas of expertise and different knowledge.”
