Organisations today find themselves caught in a contradiction that is as damaging as it is familiar. Research conducted by Hult International Business School, drawing on responses from more than 1,000 global leaders, reveals that 90 per cent of executives describe collaboration as essential for performance, innovation and long-term success. Yet more than half of those same leaders report that silo working continues to dominate daily practice. The rhetoric is unanimous; the reality is fragmented.
This tension matters more now than it might have a decade ago. Businesses are navigating competitive disruption, the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into core operations and a geopolitical environment that shifts without warning. These are not problems that any single function, team or leader can solve alone. They demand that people think across boundaries, decide collectively and act in concert. The question, then, is no longer whether collaboration matters. It is why it remains so stubbornly difficult to sustain.
The five saboteurs are not character flaws; they are rational responses to the signals that organisations send every day.
The Hult study, which underpins the recently published book The Leader’s Guide to Collaboration (Pearson), identifies five subtle dynamics that quietly erode collective effort. The researchers call them saboteurs. These forces are not the result of bad intent or a lack of goodwill. They are structural, behavioural and often unexamined. Understanding them is the first step toward building organisations that can actually do what they say they value.
The five dynamics that undermine collective work
The research distils the barriers to collaboration into five distinct but interrelated patterns. Each one operates differently, but together they form a system that pulls even well-intentioned leaders away from the collaborative behaviours they endorse.
Stuck in a silo: the dominant saboteur
The silo mentality ranks as the number one saboteur across the study’s sample. Under pressure, leaders retreat into their own domains. They protect resources, guard their teams’ metrics and focus on immediate deliverables. In the short term, this feels rational. The unintended consequence is a steady narrowing of perspective. Information is held more tightly. Cross-functional co-operation becomes conditional. Organisational energy fragments into competing pockets of effort.
Dr Malte Gerhold, Director of Innovation at one of Europe’s leading healthcare charities, observed in the research: It’s strange how quickly people identify with their silos.
What begins as sensible boundary management hardens into defensive behaviour that is difficult to reverse.
Diagnosing silo mentality requires listening for territorial language in meetings and reviews. Phrases such as that’s not our problem
or that’s a matter for HR
signal that boundaries have become walls. Tracking where cross-functional projects stall also reveals the pattern. Often, the blockage is not a lack of capability but a mindset that has learned to protect its own perimeter.
Wrong prioritisation: when real work excludes collaboration
Forty per cent of leaders in the Hult study reported that they lack sufficient time to collaborate. Valerie Gervais, Head of Learning at Saint-Gobain, put the problem plainly: People do not avoid collaboration consciously; they just get on with their jobs. This focus is often the enemy of collaboration.
This is not simply a workload issue. It reflects deeper assumptions about what counts as real work. Leaders cancel alignment meetings, squeeze cross-team initiatives into overloaded schedules and allow urgent individual tasks to crowd out collective activity. The result is a damaging paradox: organisations that profess to value collaboration but structurally deprioritise it. An audit of how collaboration time is actually allocated in calendars, versus how it appears in values statements, often reveals the gap. When collaborative work is repeatedly squeezed out and scheduling decisions are driven by hierarchy rather than genuine business need, the message to people is clear, whatever the rhetoric from the top.
I’m taking the credit: recognition and the erosion of trust
In hierarchical and political environments, recognition tends to flow toward those with titles and authority, regardless of actual contribution. When people feel that their efforts are absorbed into someone else’s success, trust erodes. They become more cautious, less willing to share ideas and increasingly focused on protecting their own visibility.
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant has identified three types of people at work: givers, takers and matchers. Where takers dominate, givers those who share ideas, facilitate others and build collective success become disillusioned. One experience of unfair credit allocation can shift a person’s orientation from collaborative to self-protective. These shifts are contagious. Listening to how success is attributed in leadership conversations, town halls and performance reviews reveals whether credit is shared generously or clustered around the most senior names. A simple pulse survey asking whether people feel their contributions are genuinely recognised can be instructive.
I want the rewards: incentive structures that work against collaboration
Kevin Martin, Chief Research Officer at the Institute of Corporate Productivity, argues that individual incentive structures are the most powerful structural barrier to collaboration. Most performance management frameworks still reward individual achievement, even while organisational strategy calls for cross-boundary working. People respond rationally to what is measured. If personal delivery is what gets rewarded, that is where effort will flow.
Mapping formal incentive structures against the collaboration behaviours an organisation wants to see often reveals a misalignment. Bonus schemes, promotion criteria and performance objectives built around individual results alone send a clear signal. Even small adjustments, such as including shared objectives or celebrating team outcomes in senior forums, can begin to shift behaviour when they are genuine and visible.
What’s our goal?: the absence of shared purpose
Perhaps the most fundamental saboteur is the absence of a genuine shared purpose. Collaboration requires far more effort than simple coordination. It relies on a clear and compelling sense of why people are working together. In the experience of the researchers, this is absent more often than leaders realise. Without a genuine why, collaborative efforts fragment. Energy is spent on alignment rather than progress.
As Dr Gerhold noted in the research: If there is not enough sense of commonality in what the organisation stands for, it’s very difficult to bring collaborators together.
When the purpose is clear and meaningful, collaboration becomes more intuitive. People invest in relationships, navigate tension and contribute beyond their formal roles. One diagnostic test is to ask project members to articulate, in their own words, why a particular collaboration matters and what success looks like. If answers vary significantly, the purpose has not been genuinely established. Shared purpose is not a slide on a deck; it is a conversation that has happened.
How the saboteurs interact
The five saboteurs do not operate in isolation. Silos are reinforced by prioritisation that squeezes out cross-functional work. Unfair recognition fuels a protective mindset that deepens silo behaviour. Incentive structures that reward individual output make silo thinking economically rational. And without a shared purpose, there is no compelling reason to push through the discomfort that collaboration inevitably requires.
This systemic quality is what makes the saboteurs so persistent. Organisations that address only one, for example, by launching a collaboration training programme while leaving incentive structures unchanged, are unlikely to see lasting improvement. The dynamics feed one another. Breaking the pattern requires attention to all of them, and to the environment that allows them to thrive.
A framework for addressing the saboteurs
The Hult research proposes a framework built around three Ps: Purpose, People and Process. Each element corresponds to a set of actions that can help organisations move beyond aspiration toward sustained collaborative practice.
Purpose is about anchoring collaborative initiatives in a shared reason for working together that people have shaped, not simply received. Without that foundation, even well-designed processes will feel hollow.
People focuses on building the capability to collaborate effectively. Many leaders have never been taught the relational competencies that collaboration demands: active listening, sharing credit, navigating disagreement and building trust across unfamiliar boundaries. These are skills that can be developed, but only when they are treated as serious learning objectives rather than soft aspirations.
Process examines the structures that either support or undermine collaboration. Performance management, recognition frameworks and resource allocation all send powerful signals about what the organisation truly values. Aligning these systems with collaborative goals is essential, even when the adjustments are small.
What the research points toward for HR leaders
The study identifies five areas where the attention of senior HR leaders can have particular leverage. These are not presented as a checklist but as findings about where the evidence suggests intervention is most needed.
First, the research suggests that anchoring collaborative initiatives in shared purpose is a critical starting point. Before launching cross-functional work, investing time in establishing a genuine why, one that participants have helped shape, appears to make a significant difference.
Second, building capability matters as much as building aspiration. Collaboration is a skill that many leaders have never been formally taught. Investing in relational competencies, from active listening to managing disagreement constructively, can turn aspiration into practised behaviour.
Third, the research indicates that redesigning structures that undermine collaboration is often necessary. Examining performance management and recognition frameworks for signals that reward individual output at the expense of collective outcomes can reveal misalignments that no amount of cultural rhetoric can fix.
Fourth, protecting time for collaboration as a strategic priority is essential. Joint working will not happen by accident. Building it into how time is allocated and priorities are set, while also recognizing that less collaboration done well is more powerful than over-collaboration or poorly executed collaboration, appears to be a more effective approach.
Fifth, making the saboteurs visible and naming them directly can disrupt the pattern. These dynamics persist largely because they are rarely surfaced. HR has a distinctive role in creating conditions for honest conversation through team reviews, 360-degree feedback and culture diagnostics that bring unexamined forces into the open.
The systemic nature of the problem
The central insight of the Hult research is that collaboration does not fail because people resist it. It fails because the environment pulls them in a different direction. The five saboteurs are not character flaws. They are rational responses to the signals that organisations send every day through their structures, their metrics and their reward systems.
This understanding carries an important implication. If the environment is the problem, then changing the environment, not exhorting people to try harder, is the solution. That shift from individual exhortation to systemic redesign is what distinguishes organisations that genuinely collaborate from those that merely talk about it.
The research from Hult makes clear that the saboteurs are identifiable, diagnosable and addressable. But addressing them requires a willingness to look honestly at the gap between what organisations say they value and what their systems actually reward. For senior HR leaders who are prepared to take that look, the evidence offers a clear path forward, not through grand transformations but through sustained attention to purpose, people and process. The organisations that take that path will be the ones best positioned to meet the disruptive, volatile and interconnected challenges that define the current business landscape.
- Why is collabration so difficult to sustain despite widespread agreement on its importance?The Hult study identifies five subtle dynamics called saboteurs, with silo mentality as the top force, that erode collective effort despite good intentions.
- What is the number one saboteur to collaboration according to the Hult study?The silo mentality is the number one saboteur, as leaders retreat into their own domains under pressure.
