Taking that to its logical conclusion, I'm prompted to make reference to groupthink. It was defined by a psychologist named Irving Janis as "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." I tend to have negative reactions to teamwork-conformity platitudes like "there's no i in team" precisely because of my experiences with groupthink in the past.

In point of fact, I think the phenomenon of groupthink is a fair bit of the mechanism behind not only bureaucratic inefficiency, high school drama, and office politics, but also -- in a more abstracted sense -- the successes of market domination strategies of large corporations and even political elections. It's not only important to recognize the contributions of the individual, but also (and perhaps more importantly) to avoid letting the individual be subsumed by the collective. Otherwise, you run the risk of becoming the next SCO, with no greater aggregate talent for innovation than your ability to dream up new lawsuit revenue scams.