All Rowing, No Direction: Why team harmony can undermine performance

There is an image that often comes to mind when we talk about effective teams. A group of people in a boat, oars dipping into the water in steady rhythm, each movement coordinated with the next. The timing is good. The effort looks shared. From the shoreline, it appears calm, competent, even admirable.

Nothing about the scene suggests failure. The rowers are focused. They move with smoothness. There is no visible conflict, no raised voices, no obvious friction to slow them down. If anything, the absence of disturbance becomes part of the evidence that the team is working well.

And yet, over time, the boat drifts.

This is not because anyone stops rowing or because effort disappears. To most observers, the performance remains coordinated. What has gone unnoticed is that coordination has been mistaken for cohesion, and cohesion for effectiveness.

Much of what we label as team building is designed to refine the rhythm of the rowing. Trust exercises, bonding activities, and shared experiences are used to bring people closer together and smooth the social surface of the group. These interventions often succeed on their own terms. People feel more connected, tension reduces, and the boat feels more stable.

What they rarely address is whether the team has a shared understanding of direction, roles, constraints, and trade-offs. The harder questions about purpose, decision-making, and productive disagreement tend to be deferred, particularly in groups that value harmony and psychological comfort. In those conditions, movement can look like progress for quite some time.

Teams, then, do not struggle because they lack goodwill or effort. They struggle because getting along is treated as a proxy for doing the right work, in the right way, together. The result is a form of collective motion that feels productive while quietly carrying the group somewhere it never intended to go.

Why bonding feels like the right response

From a psychological perspective, it is not surprising that teams respond to difficulty by turning towards bonding rather than task clarity. Social Identity Theory suggests that individuals derive a significant part of their self-concept from the groups to which they belong. When performance comes under pressure, or when uncertainty increases, reassurance of group membership becomes particularly salient. Belonging acts as a buffer against threat, even when the underlying challenge is not relational in nature.

Once a shared identity is established, group dynamics begin to reinforce this orientation. Research into groupthink has shown that cohesive groups are especially vulnerable to suppressing dissent, not because alternative views are absent, but because maintaining unity becomes an implicit priority. In such contexts, disagreement is subtly reframed as disruption rather than contribution, and the absence of overt conflict is taken as evidence that alignment has been achieved.

Bonding-based team building fits neatly within these dynamics. Activities designed to increase trust and familiarity strengthen in-group ties and reduce visible tension, which can feel like meaningful progress when teams are struggling. At the same time, these interventions can raise the social cost of speaking up. As relationships become more valued, individuals become more cautious about introducing perspectives that might unsettle the group, particularly when norms for challenge and debate have not been made explicit.

Over time, teams can experience high levels of interpersonal comfort alongside persistent ambiguity about goals, roles, and decision-making. Coordination problems are interpreted through a relational lens, while structural and cognitive misalignments remain largely unexamined. The group continues to function, often with goodwill and effort, but without the shared understanding required to navigate complexity effectively.

In this way, the focus on bonding is not a misguided choice so much as a psychologically coherent one. It reflects how humans respond to perceived threat in social systems. The difficulty arises when these same mechanisms, left unexamined, limit a team’s capacity to engage with the productive tension that effective collaboration requires.

When safety becomes comfort

As teams invest further in harmony, the consequences of disagreement acquire a quiet weight. Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, describes a climate in which individuals feel able to speak up without fear of humiliation or reprisal. In practice, however, teams often conflate safety with comfort, mistaking the absence of overt conflict for an environment that supports learning and contribution.

This pattern is cognitively predictable. Humans are wired to avoid social threat, and in-group members carry more psychological influence than abstract goals or distant outcomes. When a comment or question risks unsettling the group, even well-intentioned challenge can trigger discomfort for both speaker and listener. Over time, the avoidance of these small social risks can become habitual, narrowing the range of perspectives that are voiced.

The paradox is that teams can feel highly functional while gradually losing their capacity to adapt. Meetings run smoothly. Decisions are reached quickly. Morale appears high. Yet beneath this surface, misalignments accumulate and unresolved tensions shape behaviour indirectly. Comfort becomes a marker of success, while coordination, insight, and learning are assessed only after problems emerge.

Recognising this dynamic requires a reframing of what psychological safety actually entails. Safety is not the absence of tension. It is the presence of conditions in which differences can be surfaced, explored, and integrated without threatening membership of the group. When teams understand this distinction, “getting along” is no longer mistaken for effectiveness. It becomes one signal among many, useful in some contexts, but insufficient on its own to guide collective action.

What effective teams actually need instead

If harmony and bonding are insufficient, the question becomes what effective teams require in order to function well over time. Psychological research points less towards how teams feel about one another, and more towards how well they are able to make sense of their work together. This includes a shared understanding of purpose, clarity around roles and decision-making, and explicit norms for how disagreement is handled when perspectives diverge.

At the heart of this is a more precise interpretation of psychological safety. Safety develops when teams trust that challenge will be interpreted as contribution rather than disruption, and that membership of the group is not contingent on agreement. From a social identity perspective, this requires boundaries that are broad enough to accommodate difference without fragmenting the group.

Effective teams therefore invest not only in relationships, but in shared meaning. They surface assumptions about what success looks like, how trade-offs will be managed, and which constraints are fixed versus negotiable. These conversations are often more demanding than bonding activities, as they expose ambiguity and reveal differences in interpretation. Yet it is precisely this work that enables coordination under pressure, when informal goodwill alone is no longer sufficient.

Viewed this way, team building becomes less about strengthening interpersonal ties and more about collective sensemaking. The task is not to remove tension, but to locate it, understand it, and use it productively. When teams learn how to engage in disagreement without personal threat, conflict shifts from something to be avoided into a source of information about the system itself.

Over time, this approach produces a different kind of cohesion. Rather than being held together by comfort or similarity, teams are bound by a shared orientation toward the work and a mutual understanding of how to navigate complexity together. The rowing may not always be smooth, and the conversations may at times feel effortful, but the boat is far more likely to move with purpose rather than drift.

Team building, then, has not failed in the way it is often accused of failing. It has simply been asked to solve the wrong problem. When teams focus primarily on bonding, they may row more smoothly, but without shared sensemaking they remain vulnerable to drift. Teams that learn to engage with difference, clarify direction, and hold productive tension may not always feel comfortable, but they are far more likely to notice when their course needs adjusting, and to do so before the shoreline disappears from view.

From team building to collective sensemaking

If teams struggle not because they lack effort or goodwill but because comfort has replaced clarity, then the work of development needs to be reframed. The task is less about helping people feel closer to one another, and more about helping them think together in ways that would be difficult to achieve alone.

Effective teams are not distinguished by the absence of tension. Instead, their capacity to work with that tension is what sets them apart. They create conditions in which disagreement can surface without threatening belonging, where uncertainty can be named without undermining competence, and where direction is continually tested rather than quietly assumed.

Psychological safety, in this sense, is not a mood or an atmosphere, but a set of shared expectations about how challenge, doubt, and difference will be handled.

This shifts the purpose of team building away from bonding activities and towards collective sensemaking. Time together is used to explore purpose, clarify decision rights, examine trade-offs, and make explicit the assumptions that shape how work is done. Rather than smoothing over differences, teams learn to use them, drawing on diverse perspectives to navigate complexity and change.

Seen through this lens, leadership becomes less about alignment through instruction and more about creating the conditions in which alignment can emerge. Direction is held clearly, but not rigidly. Roles and responsibilities are defined, but open to revision as context changes. Culture acts as a coordinating force that allows leadership to be distributed across the system.

This is the logic that underpins a constellation approach to leadership.

Like navigators working from the same night sky, teams do not need to be tightly controlled to move together, but they do need shared reference points. Purpose provides orientation. Culture enables coordination. Context determines which stars matter most at any given moment.

When teams are built around these principles, getting along becomes a by-product rather than the goal. The real work is not rowing in perfect rhythm, but knowing where the boat is heading, why it matters, and how to adjust course together when the conditions inevitably change.

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