Spirit of Organization

Have you ever been at the close of a staff meeting when the supervisor or CEO said something like this: "Remember, we're a team here, so, let's keep up the team spirit." All the time, you're thinking: "Everyone is out to do his or her own thing; how can this possibly be a team?" If you've felt that way, you were probably right on target. Most so-called "teams" are not teams at all, and usually when we hear words like "teamwork" or "team spirit," what the speaker has in mind are certain behavior and attitude traits that do not in fact define the true characteristics of a team.

In an article from Scientific American, robotics experts Robert Grabowski, Luise Navarro-Serment, and Khosla Pradeep describe the move away from the do-it-all robots to smaller modular types that must work together to accomplish their task. I think their description provides an excellent illustration of the rationale for using teams to achieve better results. They write: