Romancing Team Work

I was reading a journal on teamwork yesterday. What shocked me is that after various lab research as well as field research dated back from the 1960s till now, there is NO evidence that working in teams produce better results, in terms of efficiency or productivity! To me this is shocking especially when your employer send to to various training on teamwork, having team building exercises and projects are formed in a team. In addition, many researches found that working individually and then combined individuals work as a unit is much more effective and productive!

Well, this really opened my eyes. You know how you hate going for meetings discussing the same thing over and over again, and some will not contribute at all. So why didn't we hear about this findings? I guess since it is written by academicians, accessibility to this kind of research do makes it difficult for people as well as the writings are more academician style. I have a feeling some practitioners out there, those who conducted such training might know about this but of course who would want to reveal that their programme does not really benefited the company.

However, team work have its benefit in terms of social and psychological aspect. It promotes self confidence and better communication skills. I guess we would have to think the objective of working in teams either output based or competence based.