The We-Force in Management: How to Build and Sustain Cooperation

One of American business's most pervasive and least recognized problems is a lack of internal cooperation. Managers talk a great deal about teamwork, but can't get employees to work well together. Departments strive to be more efficient and customer-focused, but often waste time overcoming bureaucratic obstacles erected within their own organization. CEOs exhort their companies to outperform the competition, yet employees spend more energy competing with the person down the hall.
Corporate strategy expert Lawrence G. Hrebiniak asserts that the inability of most Americans to cooperate with each other in the workplace curtails innovation, reduces product quality, slows responses to customers, wastes resources, and jeopardizes alliances. Drawing on his extensive research and consulting experience, Hrebiniak identifies the individual, organizational, and cultural impediments to cooperation. One of the chief barriers is the same force that is responsible for many American business successes. The individual drive for achievement, which Hrebiniak calls the "I-Force," is as American as the Horatio Alger, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison legends. But in this new era that demands information sharing, quick responses, and team efforts, he says, the traditional "I-Force" must be leveraged into a more collaborative "We-Force."
Hrebiniak demonstrates how to foster a more cooperative attitude among individual employees and how to recognize and remedy the institutional barriers to cooperation that are inherent in most pay plans, communication systems, organizational structures, and corporate goals.
The We-Force in Management offers CEOs, executives, and managers important and practical advice that will help eliminate internal one-upmanship, facilitate communication among departments, foster cooperation among divisions around the globe, or strengthen a joint partnership.