I’m reading Social Physics at the moment. It talks about a study at Bell Laboratories…
“Average performers thought teamwork meant doing their part on the team. Star performers, however, saw things differently: They pushed everyone on the team toward joint ownership of goal setting, group commitments, work activities, schedules, and group accomplishments. This is, star performers promoted synchronised, uniform idea flow within the team by making everyone feel a part of it, and tried to reach a sufficient consensus so that everyone would willingly go along with the new ideas…
… A surprising finding is that when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others – e.g. rowing together, dancing together – our bodies release endorphins, natural opiates that give a pleasant high as a reward for working together.”
The Bell Labs study is backed up by recent experiments using big data.