Teamwork Challenged
In Doug Colligan’s (BUSINESS BOOKSHELF, WSJ June 17, 2009) opening paragraph he states: “All you loyal foot soldiers of business who have endured the forced camaraderie of team-building exercises at corporate retreats, whose office shelves bulge with loose-leaf binders from long-forgotten management-training seminars, who have wearily committed to memory the latest makeover of the company’s inscrutable Mission Statement, rejoice, Jonathan Littman and Marc Hershon offer a way to cope in their breezily cynical survival guide “I Hate People.” ”
Mr. Colligan quotes from the book the authors’ rationale as to why teamwork might not always be the best answer for productivity. Colligan states: “Teamwork, the authors say, suffocates creativity and has its own limitations. They describe a classic experiment done nearly a century ago by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann. He measured people pulling on a rope connected to a strain gauge, first as individuals and then as members of tug-of -war teams. The result: A person pulls harder alone than as part of a group. Ringelmann dubbed the phenomenon “social loafing.” Today it is known simply as the Ringelmann Effect, and what it means in the real world, say Messrs. Littman and Hershon, is that “the more people you throw at a problem, the less each contributes.”
readings by d. quayle
