Team-building interventions seek to build competent, collaborative, and
creative work teams by removing the barriers to effective group functioning
and by helping participants better understand and utilize the group processes
associated with effective group behavior. This article examines a confron
tation-team-building intervention that was highly successful in building the
supervisors into a cohesive, trusting, and unified group. However, the team
became the most important variable, with little consideration given to the
rest of the organization. As a result, the whole organization was severely
crippled and had to be completely rebuilt. Lessons are drawn from this
excellent example of a lopsided intervention.
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