The Hard Truth About Collaboration: Why Teamwork is So Hard (and How to Fix It)

Collaboration is one of the most celebrated ideas in modern organisations. It appears in mission statements, leadership frameworks, performance reviews, and town halls. Teams are encouraged to break silos, work cross-functionally, and align to common goals.

And yet, collaboration remains one of the most persistent organisational struggles.

Projects stall. Departments compete. Meetings multiply. Misunderstandings compound. Teams claim alignment while quietly optimising for different outcomes.

While leaders often stress the importance of collaboration, they tend to underestimate the forces working against it.

The Myth of Natural Teamwork

Research consistently shows that effective collaboration is not automatic.

According to Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, high-performing teams require psychological safety — a shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. Without it, individuals withhold ideas, avoid conflict, and default to self-protection.

Meanwhile, research on social loafing (Latané, Williams & Harkins, 1979) demonstrates that individuals exert less effort when working in groups than when working alone — especially when accountability is diffuse.

From a cognitive standpoint, humans are not naturally wired for seamless collaboration. We evolved for small-group survival, not matrixed corporate ecosystems involving multiple reporting lines, digital communication layers, and competing incentives.

In other words, collaboration is not instinctive at scale. It is designed — or it fails.

What Stops Teams From Working Well Together?

1. Misaligned Incentives

One of the most significant barriers to collaboration is structural, not behavioural.

Teams are often evaluated on functional KPIs — sales targets, operational efficiency, cost containment, customer acquisition — while collaboration is treated as a soft expectation rather than a measurable outcome.

Research in organisational design shows that people optimise for what they are rewarded for. If incentives are not aligned across teams, cooperation becomes optional — and competition becomes rational.

For example, it is indeed very easy to have a scenario where sales may prioritise revenue speed, operations may prioritise cost discipline, and compliance may prioritise risk mitigation. Each team may succeed individually while the company underperforms collectively.

2. Goal Misalignment: Are Team Goals Truly Linked to Company Strategy?

In theory, cascading objectives align teams to corporate strategy.

In practice, research by Gallup indicates that only about 40% of employees strongly agree that they know what their organisation stands for and how their work contributes to it.

This suggests that company goals are often too abstract, team goals are translated unevenly and trade-offs between functions are rarely clarified.

As strategy moves downward, interpretation expands. What begins as a corporate ambition (e.g. Increase market leadership”) becomes multiple departmental interpretations — some complementary, some conflicting.

Without explicit trade-off discussions, teams pursue “local optimisation” rather than enterprise value.

3. Identity and In-Group Bias

Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) explains that individuals derive part of their self-concept from group membership.

Within organisations, this manifests as “Finance vs Marketing”, “HQ vs Field”, or “Operations vs Sales”.

Even when unintentional, this in-group/out-group bias shapes perception:

• We see our constraints as real.
• We see others’ constraints as excuses.
• We interpret our motives as strategic.
• We interpret others’ motives as political.

Cross-team collaboration therefore becomes less about shared goals and more about defending territory.

4. Communication Overload Without Clarity

Modern teams communicate more than ever — emails, Slack channels, dashboards, shared drives, project tools.

Yet research from MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab suggests that the quality of interaction patterns — energy, engagement, and exploration — predicts team performance more than sheer communication volume.

More interaction does not equal better collaboration. Often, collaboration fails because decisions are ambiguous, ownership is unclear, meetings substitute for alignment (but fail to achieve it), and difficult conversations are avoided. The absence of structured decision-making creates friction disguised as busyness. So much communication – yet people seem to be ever more unclear about the stance that is required.

Related: Workplace Communication: Stop Asking “Do You Understand?”

5. Fear of Conflict

Patrick Lencioni’s work on team dysfunction identifies fear of conflict as a core barrier.

Teams that avoid productive disagreement:

• Experience artificial harmony.
• Suppress dissent.
• Fail to surface trade-offs early.
• Escalate problems later.

Ironically, teams that appear harmonious may be the least collaborative — because collaboration requires constructive friction.

6. Complexity and Cognitive Load

As organisations grow, interdependencies multiply. Cross-team work demands perspective-taking, systems thinking, negotiation, prioritisation under ambiguity. Cognitive psychology tells us that under high cognitive load, individuals revert to simplifying heuristics: protect your own goals, minimise risk and avoid any additional uncertainty at all cost.

In high-pressure environments, collaboration is often the first casualty.

The Illusion of Alignment

Organisations frequently claim alignment because everyone attended the strategy town hall, OKRs were cascaded and slides were shared on specific matters. That should do it right? But alignment, is not information transfer.

Alignment requires shared interpretation, agreed trade-offs, and visible consequences for misalignment. Without these, teams may nod in agreement while internally redefining goals in ways that suit their own metrics.

True alignment is tested not when things are easy — but when objectives conflict.

Within-Team vs Across-Team Collaboration

The challenges differ in important ways.

1. Within Teams

Barriers tend to revolve around psychological safety, role clarity, accountability and interpersonal trust. These can often be strengthened through leadership behaviour, team norms, and clear feedback loops.

2. Across Teams

Barriers are more structural - competing KPIs, resource constraints, status differences,, ambiguous authority and differing time horizons. Cross-team collaboration requires governance clarity, decision rights, and explicit integration mechanisms — not just better relationships.

Think your team collaborates well? Test it.
Stratagem by eVULX drops participants into a 2030 war-based simulation where diplomacy, conflict, and competing agendas collide. Teams must work together — and against each other — to win.

So What Could Change All This?

Collaboration improves when organisations address structure and psychology simultaneously.

1. Align Incentives, Not Just Intentions

Shared goals must be measurable and interdependent.

For example:

• Introduce joint KPIs across departments.
• Tie bonuses partly to enterprise outcomes, not just functional success.
• Reward cross-functional problem-solving.

When collaboration affects compensation and recognition, behaviour shifts.

2. Make Trade-Offs Explicit

Leaders should openly clarify:

• What will be prioritised.
• What will be sacrificed.
• Who has final decision rights.

Ambiguity breeds territorial behaviour. Clarity reduces political friction.

3. Design for Psychological Safety

Leaders must model admitting uncertainty, inviting dissent, framing failures as learning and separating ideas from identity.

Psychological safety does not eliminate conflict — it enables healthy conflict.

4. Create Shared Experiences

Research on intergroup contact suggests that structured collaboration around shared challenges reduces bias.

Cross-functional simulations, strategic problem-solving labs, and enterprise-wide initiatives create perspective alignment faster than policy memos ever will.

When people experience trade-offs together, empathy increases.

5. Improve Decision Architecture

Instead of relying on consensus or escalation, organisations benefit from clear RAPID or RACI frameworks, defined escalation paths and agreed conflict resolution protocols.

Collaboration improves when decision rights are transparent.

6. Build Enterprise Thinking as a Leadership Skill

Leaders must be trained not only to run their teams — but to think systemically.

Enterprise thinking involves understanding second-order effects, anticipating interdependencies, and balancing short-term wins with long-term positioning. Without this capability, collaboration becomes negotiation rather than integration.

A Final Reflection: Collaboration is Not About Harmony

Collaboration is often romanticised as agreement and positivity.

In reality, effective collaboration is:

• Structured disagreement.
• Visible trade-offs.
• Shared accountability.
• Collective ownership of consequences.

It requires emotional maturity, organisational clarity, and systems design.

Most teams struggle not because people are unwilling, but because incentives conflict, goals are abstract, authority is unclear and psychological risk is high.

The good news is that collaboration improves when leaders design for it.

When organisations align structure with behaviour, clarify trade-offs, and reward enterprise outcomes over local wins, collaboration stops being aspirational — and starts becoming operational.

And when that happens, teams do not just work together. They move together.