For a long time, organizations have been dominated by the conventional belief that collaboration reduces individual freedom, while competition expands opportunities for choice and achievement. Yet cooperative environments strengthened psychological safety rather than controlling employees and enhanced their sense that they could act in ways of their own choosing. Autonomy did not emerge simply by leaving people alone. It could grow more powerfully from the belief that everyone’s success was interconnected.

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In organizations, collaboration and autonomy have often been placed on opposite sides. Emphasizing collaboration was believed to increase the number of meetings, complicate decision-making, and make it more difficult for individuals to work in their preferred ways. Conversely, increasing autonomy was thought to require assigning independent areas of responsibility to each person and minimizing interference from others. It was a simple distinction: Collaboration meant moving together, while autonomy meant deciding alone.

This perception reflects part of reality. When every task must be decided collectively or even minor judgments require consensus, individual discretion diminishes. When employees are required to monitor one another’s schedules, share progress excessively, and conform to the group’s opinion in the name of collaboration, collaboration becomes a form of control. Organizations have also encountered a paradox in which collaborative tools and recurring meetings multiply while employees lose control over their own time.

The problem, however, lies less in collaboration itself than in how collaboration is designed. Cooperation in pursuit of a common goal and group control that requires every action to be decided collectively are not the same thing. Autonomy does not mean isolation from other people, either. In an organizational setting, autonomy is closer to the feeling that people are choosing their own actions, the belief that their judgment is respected, and the perception that they can express an opinion or change their approach when necessary.

A study conducted by Valentino Emil Chai and Nir Halevy of Stanford Graduate School of Business posed an intriguing question at precisely this point: In which setting do people feel the greatest freedom?a competitive environment, a cooperative environment, or one in which everyone works independently? The common expectation would point to the independent environment. A setting in which a person’s interests are not entangled with those of others and each person takes responsibility for their own performance appears most conducive to autonomy.

The findings were different. People experienced greater autonomy in cooperative environments than they did not only in competitive environments but also in environments where everyone worked independently. Even when people were given objectively identical choices, their sense of freedom changed according to the social context in which those choices were made. Working together did not reduce individual freedom. Instead, it created psychological space in which people could make choices with greater confidence and security.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2026, the research consisted of nine surveys and experiments involving a total of 16,669 participants. Rather than relying on one company or profession, the researchers examined people working in a wide range of settings, including varsity athletes, private-sector employees, and public-sector workers. They combined surveys, archival data analysis, incentivized decision-making experiments, and negotiation experiments to test the consistency and causal nature of the findings.

In the initial studies, varsity athletes and employees were asked how cooperative or competitive they perceived their environments to be. The researchers also measured how freely they felt able to make judgments and act in their work and training. People who perceived their environments as more cooperative tended to report greater autonomy. The opposite pattern appeared among those who perceived their environments as highly competitive.

Survey findings alone cannot prove that cooperation increases autonomy. People who already felt highly autonomous might have evaluated their organizations as more cooperative, or a third factor?such as a good leader or flexible organizational policies?might have increased both cooperation and autonomy. To address these limitations, the researchers conducted experiments in which they directly altered the reward structures participants encountered.

In one experiment, participants received the same decision-making task, but the social relationships surrounding the task were designed differently. Under the cooperative condition, the interests of the participant and their counterpart were aligned so that both could achieve favorable outcomes together. Under the competitive condition, one person’s gain resulted in the other person’s loss. Under the independent condition, each person’s choices and rewards had no effect on the other. The number and content of the available actions remained the same, but the social meaning assigned to those actions changed.

Participants experienced greater autonomy under the cooperative condition than under the competitive condition. Notably, the cooperative condition also generated greater autonomy than the independent condition. Contrary to the expectation that people would feel freest when making decisions and receiving rewards alone, they perceived their choices as more voluntary when their interests were aligned with those of others.

A subsequent experiment using a negotiation setting produced similar findings. When participants viewed their negotiation counterpart as a collaborator with whom they needed to create value, they expressed their opinions more comfortably and examined a wider range of possibilities. When they viewed the other person as a competitor they had to defeat, they perceived the range of available actions as narrower, even though they were given the same choices. Four supplemental studies reproduced these results using different tasks and conditions.

The central finding was not that the number of actual choices or the level of formal authority suddenly increased in a cooperative environment. Even when the objective choices remained unchanged, people anticipated the risks associated with their decisions and the reactions of others differently. Freedom was not determined solely by the number of available options. The belief that they would not be criticized for making a particular choice, confidence that they could recover from a mistake, and trust that others would not exploit their failure expanded the range of freedom people felt they possessed.

Competition can provide organizations with valuable energy. Clear rankings and rewards sharpen goals and encourage employees to focus on performance. When short-term results must be improved within a limited period, competition can become a powerful motivator. In tasks where performance is relatively easy to compare?such as sales results, project bidding, or idea competitions?appropriate competition can also strengthen concentration and accelerate execution.

Competition, however, simultaneously raises the psychological cost of making choices. In a structure where a colleague’s success reduces one’s own opportunities, sharing information can become a disadvantage. Asking for help may cause a person to be judged as incompetent, while trying a new method and failing may provide a competitor with evidence that can be used against them. Employees begin calculating what they must do to avoid being placed at a disadvantage before considering what they actually want to do.

Under these conditions, freedom declines even when choices formally remain available. Employees may have the right to express an opinion but remain silent out of fear of evaluation. They may be able to ask for help but continue struggling alone because they worry that the request will be recorded as a weakness. They may be eligible to apply for a new project but choose safer assignments after considering how failure could affect promotion prospects. Authority exists within the formal system, but actual behavior becomes constrained.

Competitive environments also cause people to monitor the behavior of others continuously. Employees must keep track of who received a better evaluation, who obtained important information first, and against whom their performance is being compared. This sense of social threat and stress narrows attention. Rather than examining multiple choices or imagining long-term possibilities, people concentrate on avoiding immediate risks.

In a cooperative environment, by contrast, a colleague’s success does not signify one’s own failure. People become confident that sharing information or helping someone else will not diminish their own share. They can use the energy previously spent protecting their ideas to solve problems and feel more comfortable presenting ideas that are not yet fully developed. Cooperation does not confine behavior to one approved method. It makes available again the options that people had avoided because of perceived danger.

This difference is especially important in work characterized by uncertainty. Competition may raise short-term performance in repetitive work where the correct answer is already known, but work involving innovation and learning requires people to accept the possibility of failure. If employees conceal mistakes and repeat only proven methods, the organization may appear stable on the surface but will struggle to generate new knowledge. The autonomy provided by a cooperative environment creates room for creativity and a psychological foundation for uncertain experimentation.

The researchers explained that psychological safety and social support play important roles in the process through which cooperation leads to autonomy. Psychological safety is the belief that people can ask questions, raise opposing views, and reveal mistakes or concerns without being humiliated or penalized. It does not simply mean that the atmosphere is comfortable. It refers to a condition in which people can take interpersonal risks.

Autonomy cannot be completed merely by granting authority. Even if a manager tells employees to “use their own judgment,” they cannot make decisions freely if the manager reacts harshly to failure or evaluates people solely by outcomes. In an organization that grants choices while implicitly predetermining the correct answer, autonomy may be perceived as a way of shifting responsibility. Employees feel the burden of failure more strongly than the authority they have received.

A cooperative organization does not leave the risks of a decision entirely to the individual. It provides the information required for judgment, analyzes the causes of problems collectively, and transforms lessons from failure into team assets. When employees trust that colleagues will not use their vulnerabilities against them, they can present incomplete ideas. Because they feel that their choices are part of a collective problem-solving process, their sense of autonomy grows.

Social support performs the same function. Knowing that someone will offer assistance when needed reduces the burden of making a choice. If autonomy is defined as the ability to solve every problem alone, support may appear to create dependence. In actual organizations, however, autonomy is closer to the ability to request resources when necessary, draw on the expertise of others, and carry out one’s judgment within a shared purpose.

Cooperation separates freedom from personal isolation. Working alone may reduce interference, but it also reduces access to information and support. The pressure of having to bear the consequences of every decision alone may cause people to cling to safe methods. Working with trusted colleagues, by contrast, allows people to attempt more difficult choices. Autonomy grows not when people move farther away from others, but when their relationships with others cease to feel threatening.

Psychological safety is not a mechanism for reducing accountability. Nor does it mean accepting every opinion without question or loosening performance standards. Goals, roles, schedules, and quality standards must remain clear in cooperative organizations. The difference lies in whether the organization punishes the person who discovers a problem or encourages that person to reveal the problem and contribute to its resolution. High standards and a safe environment for speaking up can coexist.

The finding that cooperation enhances autonomy should not be interpreted to mean that all forms of joint work promote freedom. If an organization emphasizes collaboration only as a slogan while indiscriminately increasing meetings, reports, and shared responsibilities, employees experience greater control. The essence of collaboration does not lie in requiring everyone to participate in everything. It lies in aligning interests, exchanging necessary information and support, and respecting each person’s sphere of judgment.

One of the most common mistakes is interpreting collaboration as simultaneous participation. When every team member is brought into every stage of a project, decision-making slows and responsibility becomes blurred. Employees lose the time they need to focus on their own work, while even minor decisions must await group approval. Autonomy weakens when the boundaries of collaboration and individual decision-making authority are not clearly distinguished.

A second mistake is presenting a common goal while designing rewards around intense individual competition. If an organization emphasizes team performance but requires employees to defeat their colleagues in evaluations and promotions, they will follow the actual reward structure rather than the official message. Although they may appear to collaborate, they will monopolize important information, customer relationships, and performance opportunities. A system that demands cooperation while rewarding competition damages organizational trust.

A third mistake is transforming collaboration into uniformity. When pressure to speak with one voice becomes strong, dissenting opinions are interpreted as actions that harm teamwork. Genuine cooperation, however, does not mean complete agreement. People can share a common purpose while holding different perspectives on a problem and proposing different solutions. Collaboration that does not permit disagreement strengthens group conformity rather than psychological safety.

A fourth mistake is confusing relational closeness with cooperation. A close-knit team is not necessarily a cooperative team. If people avoid raising problems to prevent conflict or tolerate one another’s poor performance, the team may appear peaceful, but learning and accountability disappear. Cooperation is closer to the ability to handle conflict productively than to the absence of conflict. Team members must be able to test ideas and judgments without attacking the person who proposed them.

A cooperative environment must therefore be built on clear boundaries. Organizations must clarify which goals are jointly owned, who has the authority to make which decisions, when input must be sought, what will be handled collectively when a failure occurs, and what remains the responsibility of the individual. Role clarity does not make collaboration rigid. It protects autonomy by reducing unnecessary interference.

To apply the effects of cooperation in organizations, leaders must first examine the structure of goals and rewards. Cooperation cannot be sustained if employees are told that they are pursuing the same goal while being rewarded only when they take opportunities away from one another. Even when individual performance is evaluated, organizations should also recognize information shared with the team, contributions to colleagues’ problem-solving, and actions that improve collective performance.

When performance evaluation places excessive emphasis on relative ranking, colleagues become potential competitors rather than collaborators. If employees compete for a limited number of top ratings, one person’s strong performance places others at a disadvantage. Not all competition must be eliminated, but in work that requires cooperation, employees’ interests should be aligned in the same direction as much as possible. A structure is needed in which individual excellence and collective performance are rewarded simultaneously.

Second, leaders must treat questions and opposing views as resources rather than costs. Employees speak less under a leader who invites disagreement in a meeting but responds defensively when disagreement actually emerges. Psychological safety develops when leaders acknowledge that their judgment may be wrong, avoid penalizing the first person to identify a problem, and look for the cause of failure in the process rather than immediately blaming an individual.

Third, the scope of decision-making authority must be clear. An autonomous team is not one that is free to decide everything. It is a team that can make decisions quickly within a clear understanding of its goals, constraints, and responsibilities. Leaders must clearly present outcome standards and non-negotiable boundaries while avoiding detailed instructions about every execution method. The direction should be aligned collectively, while the method should be left to those closest to the work.

Fourth, information sharing must not depend solely on goodwill. When necessary information is concentrated in the hands of certain individuals, employees cannot make independent judgments. Work status, the reasoning behind decisions, customer responses, and cases of failure should be appropriately shared so that each person can make better choices. Information transparency should serve as a foundation for sound judgment, not as a system for monitoring employees.

Fifth, asking for help should not be treated as a sign of insufficient ability. In a cooperative organization, requesting assistance is not an avoidance of responsibility. It is an action that identifies risk early and connects resources efficiently. Before criticizing an employee for failing to report a problem until it became serious, a leader should examine whether it was psychologically safe to ask for help at an earlier stage. Organizations in which questions and requests for support are natural can enable employees to assume greater responsibility.

Sixth, organizations must distinguish between areas where competition is needed and those where cooperation is essential. The idea that intense internal competition is required to strengthen external competitiveness is overly simplistic. Excessive internal competition can consume energy that should be directed toward competing in the external market. A certain level of competition may be useful during the early stage of generating diverse ideas, but the execution stage requires cooperation that combines information and resources. Competition and cooperation should not be treated as uniform cultures applied across the entire organization. They are tools that can be designed according to purpose.

The research broadened the perspective that had explained autonomy primarily through individual personality or formal job authority. Even when the same person was given the same choices, their sense of freedom changed according to how their interests were structured in relation to those of the people around them. Autonomy was not merely a psychological characteristic residing within the individual. It was an experience formed through relationships between people.

This finding also offers organizations a new direction for strengthening autonomy. Policies that permit remote work, allow flexible working hours, and leave work methods to individual employees are important. Yet if formal choices are expanded while internal competition and social threat remain unchanged, employees will still be unable to act freely. The social cost of exercising those choices is simply too high.

Conversely, when employees’ interests are aligned in the same direction, when it is safe to disclose mistakes and disagreements, and when necessary support is available, people can experience a high degree of autonomy even under limited conditions. Cooperation becomes not a mechanism that forces people to act in a single way, but an environment that reopens behavioral possibilities that fear had previously closed.

The questions organizations ask must also change. It is not enough to evaluate autonomy only by asking, “How much authority have we granted?” Organizations must also ask, “Can employees actually use that authority?”, “Can they raise different opinions without fearing disadvantages?”, “Will asking for help cause them to fall behind in the competition?”, and “Does a colleague’s success lead to their own failure?”

A cooperative workplace does not make decisions about freedom on behalf of its employees. It reduces relational risks so that individuals can make bolder judgments, explore a wider range of possibilities, and take responsibility for their choices. Organizational autonomy does not grow by isolating people. It grows within a structure in which people do not need to perceive one another as threats. When employees believe that they can succeed together, they can truly begin to move in ways of their own choosing.

Stanford Business Insights, March 2026, Dylan Walsh, Why Cooperative Workplaces Boost Your Sense of Freedom