This elastic banding confuses teams since they can never tell what the bounds of their authority are, or, they realize it's all a sham, and they have no autonomy or power anyway, just the appearance of it. . When we have an autocratic executive in an organization, this makes effective teamwork at lower levels difficult, even though that work unit may have a more participatory leader. Some tasks require teamwork, while some tasks are best done by a single individual working alone. Some require a mix. If you have a predominance of job tasks that are best done independently, then productivity can suffer if you try to shoehorn them into a team situation.
Writing is an example of a task that is best carried out by a single individual.
Having more than one person working simultaneously on the same piece of work is likely to stop effective writing in its tracks, because teamwork disrupts a process that occurs primarily in a single brain. Putting together an entire magazine, however, is an example of a mixed task. Some parts of the process, particularly the creative components, benefit from team involvement, and all tasks depend on team coordination. Fire-fighting, however, is best done by a highly integrated team, because it is complex, and the safety of all depends on the ability of members of the team to act in a concerted way. That's way we rarely hear of the superstar firefighter.