Team Leadership

How do groups cohere? Historically, strong leadership and a shared culture have been the primary factors in determining collective unanimity within social groups. Managers today might not have absolute power of life or death over their staff, being restricted to hiring and firing in their power to enforce the hierarchy, and their corporate mythology might shade by comparison with that of, say, ancient Rome; yet, although managers today need to unite different people without the traditional binding agents of shared ethnicity or religion, unifying them in pursuit of tasks which can sometimes appear dreary even to the most committed worker, it is becoming abundantly clear that negative motivation – the threat of unemployment – is at best a limited management tool. Although the knowledge that keeping one’s job is contingent on performance necessarily informs every worker’s consciousness, fear alone breeds hatred, discord and consequently inefficiency. It is a truth almost universal...