When Is Collaboration a Bad Idea?
The Find: Two heads are not always better than one says an INSEAD professor who has studied collaboration and productivity for 15 years.- The Source: Research from INSEAD professor Morten Hansen explained in INSEAD Knowledge.
Sony had all the pieces; they've got the music division, they've got the electronics division, they've got the software division, they've got consumer goods, and they even supplied the batteries to the original iPod. So they've got all of the components. Yet when they tried to put the pieces together which they had in-house, they couldn't.What's the lesson here? When a company has a highly competitive culture like Sony's, attempts to encourage collaboration often backfire, wasting workers' valuable time. But projects in a company with a cut-throat culture is not the only time collaboration ends up causing more harm than good, according to Hansen. He also notes that when collaboration is over-valued, companies risk rewarding working together as an end in itself and drifting away from a tough evaluation of the actual value of the final products of these group efforts. So how do you collaborate right? Hansen has three tips:
- First, be selective about projects earmarked for collaboration
- Second, identify the barriers to collaboration
- Third, tailor the management interventions to those barriers after diagnosing what they are
The Question: True or false: management encouraged collaborations are usually constructive?
(Image of collaborative working by Unhindered by Talent, CC 2.0)