I think these are good qualifiers in some respects.  The teams I felt the most comfortable working in were ones where I felt like I was respected by my peers, that everyone was doing their part, and that it was okay to go against the flow if you had an idea.<p>The problem is in attempting to attain the things above, I&#x27;ve also been on teams in a company where I was clearly the strongest person on the team, and was chastised for providing too much guidance because management had the idea it was better for people to fail on their own (in production) than it was for only one person on the team to be the primary contributor of plans&#x2F;the way to go.  Maybe they were right, but the end result was that it made &#x2F;me&#x2F; feel disrespected by management, and my own contributions suffered, causing the overall team to suffer because the other team members were too junior to pick up the slack when my contributions fell off.<p>I think there&#x27;s a right way and a wrong way to try to achieve these qualities in a team.  My personal experience is that when you have a team of people who are all very strong in at least one skill set and have clear pathways to communication it works much better than having a team which is relatively weak&#x2F;junior with only one or two people who are strong unless there are clear lines of seniority.  It&#x27;s a consequence of the idea in modern society that &quot;all opinions are created equal&quot; is not only true, but a good thing.  It&#x27;s important that either you&#x27;re in a group where you can trust the equality of everyone&#x27;s opinions, or that you have clear leaders that can mentor everyone else and provide strong guidance.<p>Basically, if you can, build an &quot;A-Team&quot;.  If you can&#x27;t do that, make sure you don&#x27;t actively undermine your A players.  If your A players aren&#x27;t jerks, they&#x27;re naturally rise into leadership roles in the team and help mentor&#x2F;teach everyone else to bring them up as well.  Undermining the A players will end up causing the entire group to suffer and eventually the A players will leave and you&#x27;ll be stuck with a group that&#x27;s significantly weaker for it.<p>Of course my thoughts above are primarily focused on technical teams, I don&#x27;t know if they apply as clearly to non-technical teams, and this Google study appears to have looked at both.