Practices for Productive Teams

Teamwork is dead. Long live teamwork.

It’s been over 15 years since the best-selling The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni, 2002) popularized some of the common pitfalls associated with teamwork in business settings, and you might think that the enormous volumes written on teamwork since then has saturated the market.

It hasn’t.

Because advances in information-communication technologies (ICT) have changed so much about teamwork in workplace settings that Lencioni’s insights have become dated, if not outright obsolete, and more recent authors have yet to correct new misconceptions.

Allow me to summarize the current thinking by paraphrasing Lencioni. Although he wrote Five Dysfunctions… as a fable (in the tradition of Steven Johnson’s One Minute… series, and other business authors), I’ll take a more academic approach to summarizing the main points.

The 2002 bestseller ‘5 Dysfunctions of a Team’ highlighted the ways that teamwork in business can breakdown.

The five dysfunctions relate to:

1. Competing priorities,
2. False commitments,