The Superficiality of Teamwork

In Richard Sennett's 1998 work The Corrosion of Character:  The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, one of his arguments is that the corporate value of teamwork, while perhaps seeming communal on the surface, actually functions as a device for minimizing dissension.  In Sennett's view, dissent is a vital source of bonding in any social context, and "teamwork" seeks to eliminate employer accountability to employee:

 

A more realistic view of how communities hold together appears in Lewis Coser’s classic essay "The Functions of Social Conflict." Coser argued that people are bound together more by verbal conflict than by verbal agreement, at least immediate agreement. In conflict, they have to work harder at communicating; as often happens in labor or diplomatic negotiations, gradually the ground rules of engagement bind the contending parties together. Coser remarked that differences of views often become sharper and more explicit even though the parties may eventually come to agreement: the scene of conflict becomes a community in the sense that people learn how to listen and respond to one another even as they more keenly feel their differences...Teamwork, for instance, does not acknowledge differences in privilege or power, and so is a weak form of community; all the members of the work team are supposed to share a common motivation, and precisely that assumption weakens real communication. Strong bonding between people means engaging over time their differences.