Summary: Research from Hult International Business School found that silo working is dominating despite understanding of the importance of collaboration. Five dynamics are making collaboration difficult to sustain.
Our research with over 1,000 global leaders reveals a striking paradox: 90 per cent describe collaboration as essential for performance, innovation and long-term success, yet more than half report that silo working continues to dominate daily practice.
Many organisations loudly endorse collaboration while unexamined, unnamed forces quietly undermine it.
This matters enormously right now. Organisations face competitive disruption, AI transformation and geopolitical volatility: challenges that no single function or leader can solve alone. These are precisely the problems that require people to think, decide and act together.
For senior HR leaders, this tension is both familiar and frustrating. The question is no longer whether collaboration matters, but why it proves so difficult to sustain. Our research — which underpins our new book, The Leader’s Guide to Collaboration, reveals that the answer lies not in a lack of goodwill, but in five subtle dynamics that quietly erode collective effort. We call them saboteurs.
1. Stuck in a silo
The silo mentality is consistently the number one saboteur.
Under pressure, leaders retreat into their own domains, protecting resources, safeguarding metrics and focusing on immediate deliverables. This feels rational in the short term. The unintended consequence is a narrowing of perspective. Leaders hold information more tightly, cross-functional collaboration becomes conditional and organisational energy fragments.
As Dr Malte Gerhold, Director of Innovation at one of Europe’s leading healthcare charities, observed: “It’s strange how quickly people identify with their silos”. What begins as sensible boundary management gradually hardens into defensive behaviour.
How to diagnose it
Look for teams that consistently deliver within their boundaries but struggle to contribute beyond them. Listen for territorial language: “that’s not our problem”, “that’s a matter for HR.” Track where cross-functional projects stall. Often, the blockage is not capability but mindset.
The question is no longer whether collaboration matters, but why it proves so difficult to sustain
2. Wrong prioritisation
Forty per cent of leaders in our research believe they lack sufficient time to collaborate. Valerie Gervais, Head of Learning at Saint-Gobain, put it 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 and squeeze cross-team initiatives into overloaded schedules. The result is a damaging paradox: organisations that profess to value collaboration but structurally deprioritise it.
How to diagnose it
Audit how collaboration time is actually allocated in calendars versus how it appears in values statements.
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.
3. I’m taking the credit
In hierarchical and political environments, recognition flows towards those with titles and authority, regardless of actual contribution.
When people feel 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 identifies 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 someone’s orientation from collaborative to self-protective, and these shifts are contagious.
How to diagnose it
Listen to how success is attributed in leadership conversations, town halls and performance reviews. Is credit shared generously, or does it cluster around the most senior names? A simple pulse survey asking whether people feel their contributions are genuinely recognised can be instructive.
4. I want the rewards
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 strategy calls for cross-boundary working. People respond rationally to what is measured. If personal delivery is what’s incentivised, that is where effort will flow.
How to diagnose it
Map your formal incentive structure against the collaboration behaviours you want to see. Are bonus schemes, promotion criteria and performance objectives built around individual results alone? Are there any mechanisms (however small) that explicitly reward collective outcomes?
When people feel 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
5. What’s our goal?
Perhaps the most fundamental saboteur is the absence of shared purpose.
Collaboration requires far more effort than coordination. It relies on a clear and compelling sense of why people are working together. In our experience, 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 puts it: “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.
How to diagnose it
Ask project members to articulate, in their own words, why this 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.
Five insights for HR leaders
Understanding the saboteurs is the first step. Acting on them requires attention to the 3Ps: Purpose, People and Process.
- Anchor collaborative initiatives in shared purpose. Before launching cross-functional work, invest time establishing a genuine ‘why’ – one that people have shaped, not just received.
- Build the capability, not just the aspiration. Collaboration is a skill many leaders have never been taught. Invest in relational competencies: active listening, sharing credit, navigating disagreement and building trust across unfamiliar boundaries.
- Redesign structures that undermine collaboration. Examine performance management and recognition frameworks. Even small adjustments in shared objectives, such as celebrating team success in senior forums, can begin to shift behaviour.
- Protect time for collaboration as a strategic priority. Joint working will not happen by accident. Build it into how time is allocated and how priorities are set. Less collaboration, done well, is more powerful than over collaboration or poorly executed collaboration.
- Make the saboteurs visible and name them. These dynamics persist 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.
Collaboration does not fail because people resist it. It fails because the environment pulls them in a different direction.
By identifying and addressing these saboteurs through attention to purpose, people and process, HR leaders can shift collaboration from aspiration to practice and unlock far more of their organisation’s collective potential.
Your next read: Five steps: Your guide for leading with greater clarity
