Here is a brief except from an article by Jon Katzenbach for strategy+business magazine, published by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company). To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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People sometimes tell me that The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 1993) helped them understand the difference between great team experiences and terrible team experiences. These readers recognized the value of what my coauthor, Doug Smith, and I called a “real team” — a team composed of people committed to common purposes, goals, and working approaches accepting of the diversity in others’ skills and perspectives. In real teams, members hold themselves and their teammates mutually accountable, because of their emotional commitment to the work and to one another. That’s how they get things done rapidly and effectively.

But all too often, these teams act as stand-alone entities within a larger, more indifferent culture, where people feel little or no connection to one another and to the work. This invariably limits the effectiveness of the teams. Indeed, it helps explain a research finding by Stanford University professor Behnam Tabrizi that 75 percent of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional. They lack clarity about their goals and accountability. They struggle more than teams that exist within a particular business or function, and there’s a reason for that: Because they are broad-based, it’s far more difficult for them to develop the personal respect that leads team members to care about their work together.

Many of us know the combination of despair, frustration, and amusement that people can feel as a result of being isolated from a culture, while at the same time being part of a great team. This bittersweet feeling is captured, for instance, in some classic modern novels. I’m thinking of books such as Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. In these novels, protagonists create their own groups of disenfranchised people, within a larger culture that tries to shut them down. They are, in effect, real teams. They are emotionally energized and wholly committed to a goal, but their goal is typically mere survival as the disaffected individuals face off against the larger organization. These types of books often end semi-tragically; the team dissolves, its members scatter, and the larger organizational culture doesn’t change.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Jon Katzenbach is an advisor to executives for Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting group. He is a managing director with PwC US, based in New York, and founder of the Katzenbach Center, Strategy&’s global institute on organizational culture and leadership. His books on organizational culture, leadership, and teaming include aforementioned The Wisdom of Teams (with Douglas K. Smith; Harvard Business School Press, 1993) and Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (In)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results (with Zia Khan; Jossey-Bass, 2010).