Apr 2, 2009

Professor Morten Hansen on When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company

From the Harvard Business Review

When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company

By Morten T. Hansen

Internal collaboration is almost universally viewed as good for an organization. Leaders routinely challenge employees to tear down silos, transcend boundaries, and work together in cross-unit teams. And although such initiatives often meet with resistance because they place an extra burden on individuals, the potential benefits of collaboration are significant: innovative cross-unit product development, increased sales through cross-selling, the transfer of best practices that reduce costs.

But the conventional wisdom rests on the false assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. In fact, collaboration can just as easily undermine performance. I’ve seen it happen many times during my 15 years of research in this area....

The problem here wasn’t collaboration per se; our statistical analysis found that novice teams at the firm actually benefited from exchanging ideas with their peers. Rather, the problem was determining when it makes sense and, crucially, when it doesn’t. Too often a business leader asks, How can we get people to collaborate more? That’s the wrong question. It should be, Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value? In fact, to collaborate well is to know when not to do it....

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016