Collective Disconnection Norm

The collective trap that Leslie Perlow documented at Boston Consulting Group has a precise structural logic: it was created without intention by the convergence of individually rational behaviors, and it can only be dissolved by organizational action that reconfigures the social mechanisms through which it was produced. The individual who tries to build a personal boundary within an unchanged collective culture finds the boundary eroding with the reliability of a physical law: her teammates compensate for her reduced availability, her responsive production gap is visible to managers, and the social costs overwhelm the cognitive benefits within weeks. The collective disconnection norm is Perlow’s term for the alternative: a team that decides together what its norms of engagement will be, enforces those norms through the same social dynamics of peer observation and implicit signaling that created the overwork norm, and thereby creates conditions that no individual could create alone. The insight generalizes from the