Part One

I have worked in pharmaceutical sales, turfgrass management, and as a valet. Across those settings, I have encountered a familiar assumption: employees described as a team are presumed to operate as one. I have become skeptical of that description when the working relationships do not support it.

In looking into workplace team language, I came across the Hawthorne Studies, conducted from 1924 to 1933. They helped shape the human relations movement by drawing attention to workers’ motivation, social relationships, and group norms.1 That history provides useful background for examining how people work together. It does not settle whether a particular workplace functions as a cohesive team.

In Charles Duhigg’s account of Google’s research into team effectiveness, Julia Rozovsky recalled a stressful business-school study group. “I always felt like I had to prove myself,” she said. Her account of members competing for authority and talking over one another felt familiar to me.2

Google’s Project Aristotle, however, directed attention to how people worked together rather than simply who belonged to the team. Its findings emphasized psychological safety, dependability, clear roles and goals, meaningful work, and a sense that the work matters.3 Those findings reinforce the importance of examining the conditions under which cooperation actually happens.

I also asked friends, colleagues, and relatives, “Do you have a favorite team?” Most named a sports team. My sister, who rarely watches sports, asked, “Which sport?” Her response captured the association I had been noticing. But my question itself invited a sports answer. These informal conversations showed an association among the people I asked; they did not establish why employees compete at work.

Sports teams can combine cooperation toward a shared result with competition for selection or playing time. A workplace can also expect cooperation while rewarding employees for outperforming their colleagues. When those expectations conflict, calling the employees a team does not resolve the tension. The incentives deserve examination alongside the language.

The word “team” can offer a comfortable sense of unity before anyone has examined whether that unity exists. It can make cooperation sound like a settled fact and leave the actual relationships unexamined. That is the comfort I distrust: agreement about what to call ourselves can spare us the harder question of how we treat one another.

Before asking how to make a team more efficient, we should ask how to help the individuals in it work together more effectively.

1. Baker Library, Harvard Business School. The Human Relations Movement: Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments 1924–1933; The Hawthorne Effect. Accessed October 13, 2026.

Hawthorne experiments introduction | The Hawthorne Effect

2. Duhigg, Charles. What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. The New York Times Magazine, 2016.

The New York Times article

3. Google re:Work. Understand team effectiveness. Accessed October 13, 2026.

Google’s published findings