Hansen is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results (Harvard Business Press, May 2009). He talked with Kathleen Melymuka about how to spot destructive collaboration.

Your article seems heretical. How can internal collaboration be counterproductive? People engage in cross-unit projects that turn out to cost more than the value they produce. Sometimes they drank the Kool-Aid that collaboration is great and we must do more, and they start collaborating on projects that have marginal value to begin with.

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You say that managers shouldn't be asking, "How can we get people to collaborate more?" What should they ask? "How can we instill so we increase results?" The consequence of asking the second question is that you also ask, "When should we not do it?"