Teamplayer: Selfish, non-innovative and bad for bussiness

november 19th, 2008

In management a lot of attention have been going towards the group genious and similar ideas. All good - I for one think collaboration is just swell…

However - Dilbert has another idea about teamplayers.

But then again: While Dilbert express how team players are hard-working suckers, Gelman makes the game theoretic point, that teamplayers are power hungry, coalition forming oppressors.

Tor Eriksson and John Krejslers have put the matter under investigation, and concluded that teamwork is bad for bussiness (danish link - google translation here). Their reasoning is more inline with Dilbert than with Gelman. But I do think Gelman has a point: Even when teamplayers are very diligent, hard-working and sober, group descision making often comes down to the lowest common denominator. Innovation is actually curbed, because the team does what everybody already can do. Not what is best. Not what everybody should do.

So while Erikkson Krejlers and Dilbert make the lazy co-worker argument against teamwork - and advises to only use teamwork for highly innovative purposes, I tend to say the opposite.

So am I advocating big corporations and line, file and rank hierachial organization? Hardly - But I do think the world of wikinomocis and open source innovation, where the bussines unit is an individual - not a team - still has a huge potential.

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