Earlier today I wrote that, in the United States, teamwork should be utilized to organize work only when it is necessary and cost effective. I should have explained why the caveat "in the United States" was inserted.
Research by Geert Hofstede (1980, 1983) has shown that Americans are the most highly individualistic people among the 40 nations he studied. That means that we feel less constrained by group norms and more free to pursue our own interests and those of our immediate family. By contrast, the Japanese have very group-oriented values.
Teamwork comes more naturally to people from group-oriented cultures, much less naturally to individualists. This probably helps explain why team-oriented Japanese management techniques rarely worked in U.S. organizations, and why few U.S. firms use them today.
