Collaboration may be attractive to management teams due to reasons apart from productivity. Management may even know and accept that productivity suffers. A br

Collaboration may be attractive to management teams due to reasons apart from productivity. Management may even know and accept that productivity suffers. A brilliant idea coming from an individual is less trustworthy than a mediocre idea coming out of a group effort. Management has little idea how to judge the quality of a new idea, and worse, the risks of adopting it. When the idea comes from a group, it is much "safer" because if it were dangerously risky, or likely to cost 10 times as much as proposed and fail anyway, or step on toes, someone in the group would have noticed and nixed it, supposedly. In a collaborative situation, you'd not only need to come up with the idea, but then sell it to others with different outlooks, who favor their own idea instead, or their friends' idea, or with a desire to change your idea to appropriate partial credit for it. That's not to say in a small group of like-minded people, collaboration can't be great. At its best, that becomes actual brain-storming and the idea can evolve organically into something better than any of the individual ideas. But that is not the usual big-corp cross-functional collaborative team.