Project teams are often reluctant to hold each other to account in relation to problems in each other's behaviour or performance, for fear of jeopardising good working relationships. In a collaborative project team, any one member should feel able to make clear a perceived problem in another member's behaviour or performance and should also want to be told if it is letting its peers down in any way. Notifying these problems encourages a healthy respect amongst all team members, but it also depends on individual team members trusting each other to seek solutions that are consistent with a culture of collective accountability.
Inattention to the performance of other team members encourages an individual team member only to focus only on its own position, to the detriment to the collective performance of the team as a whole. In contrast, teams should emphasise the status and performance of the team as opposed to that of individual members, for example by using tools such as the 'balanced scorecard' to establish and monitor a range of collective measures.