Low, Modest, High: How Your Culture Shapes Cooperation
In brief
Cooperation runs low, modest, or high depending on the culture around it. Why organizations that say they want cooperation still restrict it, what the warm silo costs, and when swarming teamwork backfires.
A team can love working together and regard every other department as an annoying obstacle. The warmth is real. People feel deeply connected to their colleagues and want to help them succeed. Ask the same people to work with another department, and they may need formal permission before they can begin.
Their managers can sincerely want cooperation, too. They encourage it inside the department, then restrict it through funding decisions and narrowly defined jobs. People learn to treat the colleagues beyond that boundary as obstacles because that's how those relationships are managed. Inside the wall, the team still works well together.
Ron Westrum labels his cooperation row low for pathological cultures, modest for bureaucratic cultures, and high for generative cultures. (Ron Westrum, “A typology of organisational cultures,” Quality and Safety in Health Care 13, Suppl. II, 2004.)
Low
You can be so insulated from other teams that you barely know who's in which department. Getting in touch with someone outside your group is difficult; working together may be effectively forbidden. In a pathological environment, you can find that even trying to cooperate is treated as a danger.
Email chains become a record of who did or didn't do something. Before you send another reply, you need to establish where your part ended and someone else's began. With each exchange, you spend more time covering yourself. Half the replies exist so someone can point back to them later. Even when nobody says it directly, you have to work through the passive aggressiveness to get anything done.
Leaders hoard information, so you have less context than you need. With so little shared, you struggle to understand what's happening around you. Your colleagues may hide mistakes, and you have little reason to believe your manager will watch out for you. Asking for help feels risky when you expect the person you ask to use it against you.
You wake up dreading the return to work, with a knot in your stomach. Something bad may have happened, and you worry that you'll be the one who pays for it. By the time you reach the work itself, you've already spent much of your energy on politics and self-preservation. You still have your job to do.
Modest
In a bureaucratic organization, managers say they want people to cooperate. They also limit who can work together through rules and budgets, through who funds the work and what each job description allows. Within a department, teams may cooperate readily. Beyond it, people need permission from leadership to do much of anything together. The silos are bigger.
People can enjoy their teammates and still find working across departments disheartening. Each group has a narrowly defined responsibility, with room between those definitions for work to fall through. Someone needs help and hears, “That's not my department.” The colleague doesn't know who can help, and going further is above their pay grade. The work remains unfinished.
I've watched departments point at each other while a project stalls. Engineering has built the thing but can't deploy it because operations hasn't allowed it. Elsewhere, engineering is supposed to build, but product keeps changing its mind upstream. Within each group, people can explain why they haven't moved. They need another department to do something, and they have no way to settle it together.
A project can wait weeks or months for a sign-off from a committee that meets infrequently. Some organizations allow a certain change only once every six weeks, and you have to be in the request from the previous six weeks to even get there. So it's actually twelve weeks of lead time. The people involved may all be willing to cooperate. They still have to wait for the scheduled window.
A manager who requires a formal ticket for even a five-minute exploratory conversation is manufacturing friction. Employees have to get approval to talk before they can learn enough to understand the work. Once a delay appears, that same manager can defend the department with its key performance indicators: we met our KPIs, so the delay isn't our fault. People keep adhering to whatever their group is measured on, even when the measurements make no sense for the work as a whole.
DORA asks people to respond to this survey item: “On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.” (DORA, “Generative organizational culture”.) A leader looking at a close-knit department can miss the cross-functional part. Employees may have plenty of evidence that helping their own group earns approval. What happens when helping another group puts their own departmental target at risk?
Gallup's June 2022 survey of 15,091 full- and part-time U.S. employees found 32% engaged and 18% actively disengaged, leaving half not engaged. Gallup connected that last category with quiet quitting: doing the required work while feeling psychologically detached from the job. (Jim Harter, “Is Quiet Quitting Real?” Gallup, 2022, updated 2023.)
I see bureaucratic limits on cooperation as one place where quiet quitting takes hold. When trying anything beyond your job description means waiting for approval or defending the attempt, doing only the defined job becomes understandable. People can still care about their immediate team while feeling powerless to improve anything beyond it. They stop trying to get the extra work approved.
High
Engineers work with product managers and security specialists every day. They talk through problems together before anyone writes the code. Leaders break down silos as part of the ordinary work, so people can work with the colleagues they need without negotiating a departmental exception each time.
A leader can interrupt an unproductive email exchange with a direct suggestion: “Let's stop sending emails back and forth and go sit directly with them.” The people doing the work can then work through the problem together. With psychological safety, they can ask for help; when bad news arrives, leaders welcome it. The daily cooperation continues while people figure out what to do.
Leaders also look for good cooperative behavior to highlight publicly. They pay attention to people helping each other and make that contribution visible. When a team needs direction, the leader asks: “Here's the outcome. What's the best way to get there? What do you need from me?” The people closest to the work get to think through how to do it. Their leader helps clear what is in the way.
Karl Weick and Karlene Roberts used the term heedful interrelating in their study of aircraft-carrier flight decks: people act with attention to how their contribution fits the work of others. (Karl E. Weick and Karlene H. Roberts, “Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks,” Administrative Science Quarterly 38(3), 357–381, 1993.) Colleagues who talk frequently still need to pay attention to what others are trying to accomplish. They adjust their own work with that understanding.
You feel the difference when teammates fill in for each other. My strengths cover your weaknesses, and your strengths cover mine. I associate that feeling with how we describe the best sports teams: people working together and helping each other do the work. The work can be challenging and still feel rewarding. You can see where you contributed and ask a teammate for help with the part you can't do.
Everyone running to the ball
Little kids playing soccer can all run toward the ball at once, with nobody guarding their part of the field. A team that cooperates readily can work that way too. People swarm quickly, and urgent problems get handled. Everyone is ready to help with whatever has just come in.
A team can spend so much time responding that its strategic work keeps getting put aside. The next shiny thing gets the same attention as the next urgent problem. People leave longer-term roadmap work to join in, repeatedly, until they struggle to stay focused on it at all. I regard that reactivity as the biggest cost of unmanaged cooperation. Willing colleagues can keep each other occupied while the work they intended to do waits.
People can also leave something hanging because everyone has eyes on it. Each assumes someone else is able to help or will jump on it. I see a risk of diffusion of responsibility here, the mechanism Darley and Latané studied in emergency bystander behavior. (John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, “Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8(4), 377–383, 1968.) Someone can know about the problem and still assume a colleague has taken it on.
Teammates also carry more cognitive load. What the team needs is clarity about who will act on the problems everyone can see — in the soccer image, coverage and assists.
What to change from where you are
If you're asking people to cooperate while they fear for their jobs, you have to establish basic safety first. You can't get high cooperation while helping someone feels like a way to get yourself fired. Begin with blameless postmortems, and make everyday procedures predictable enough that people know what to expect. Reward transparency when people step forward. You'll still be asking people to work together inside the conditions you set.
A leader in a bureaucratic environment can start with the outcome that requires departments to cooperate. Put people from the relevant functions together on a team that can pursue that outcome. DORA recommends cross-functional teams spanning the software delivery process as a practice for high cooperation. (DORA, “Generative organizational culture”.) The team needs authority to decide within explicit guardrails. If every decision still has to return to a functional manager for permission, people will spend their time waiting in the same way.
Managers also have to change which results they defend. Measure global metrics, not local ones. I have watched a department optimize its own output while bottlenecking another group, and the overall work gained nothing. A group that meets its target while other people sit idle has not helped either. When a leader accepts a local KPI as an answer to a stalled project, the department has little reason to change how it cooperates.
I would rather see a daily huddle than a status meeting. People in a huddle can surface what's blocking the work and identify who needs to help; a meeting organized around reporting status gives them less reason to resolve those blockers together. Ask about the work that can't move and let the people who can help work on it. They need authority to act on what comes up in the huddle.
A manager facing a slow approval process can ask, “What is this policy actually trying to prevent, and how can we achieve that goal faster?” Keep the purpose of the policy in the conversation while examining the way people currently satisfy it. A team waiting twelve weeks for a change needs someone willing to investigate why that sequence is required and what can change within the guardrails.
You have to judge the moves against the conditions in front of you. People who are afraid to help need different support from people who want to help and are waiting for permission. A team already swarming every urgent problem needs to protect its roadmap work. There is no one right answer about how much cooperation to seek or how to organize it. You'll have to decide how much planned work your team can put aside.
Catching yourself
You can be the reason cooperation stays low and remain blind to what you're doing. Notice when you hold back context or react defensively to feedback. If you reach for the rule book before considering how people could work together, you may be reinforcing the department wall. Sometimes you hear yourself say, “That's their problem.”