Every corporate team-building exercise in Britain rests, at several removes, on a claim about soldiers.
In 1948 two sociologists, Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, published an analysis of why the German army had continued to fight effectively long after defeat was obvious. Their answer, drawn from interrogations of prisoners, was that the Wehrmacht soldier fought neither for ideology nor for Germany but for the small group of men around him — his primary group — whose good opinion he needed and whose survival was bound to his own. Cohesion at the level of the squad, not conviction at the level of the nation, was what held the line.
The thesis was enormously influential, in military doctrine and far beyond it, and it is where the modern belief that bonding produces performance ultimately comes from. It has also been substantially qualified. Historians working with different sources, notably on the Eastern Front, have argued that primary groups on that front were destroyed and reconstituted so rapidly by casualties that they cannot have supplied the cohesion observed, and that ideological indoctrination and ferocious military discipline did much more of the work than Shils and Janowitz allowed. The truth is presumably some mixture, varying by theatre, and it is a good example of a finding that entered general circulation in a much simpler form than its evidence supported.
The refinement that matters for organisations came later and is clean. Cohesion is not one thing. Social cohesion is interpersonal attraction: do the members like each other and enjoy being together. Task cohesion is shared commitment to the group's objective: do they care about getting it done, and about doing it together. When these are measured separately, it is task cohesion that predicts performance. Social cohesion predicts performance weakly and inconsistently, and there is a plausible mechanism by which too much of it hurts: a group that primarily values its own pleasantness will avoid the confrontations that performance requires.
The direction of causation is also less flattering than assumed. A good deal of the observed cohesion-performance correlation runs the other way: teams that succeed become cohesive, rather than cohesive teams succeeding. Winning is enjoyable and produces mutual regard. This is why so many accounts of great teams, written retrospectively, describe an extraordinary spirit — the spirit is partly the residue of the success being explained.
Which brings the argument to the away-day. If task cohesion is what matters, then the useful team intervention is one that clarifies the objective, establishes who is doing what, surfaces disagreement about priorities, and agrees how the group will handle conflict and error. If social cohesion is what is sought, the useful intervention is lunch.
from A Guide to Occupational Psychology: People, Work and Organisations in the Modern UK (2026)
