Personal Goals versus Team Vision

Jim Seymour the American football player was asked to recall a time when he had been on a team that performed poorly. He responded with the following story reported by Larson and LaFasto (1988) in their book Teamwork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong:
In 1971, the Chicago Bears were fairly confident of doing well. Everyone was working hard to get to the playoffs and go to the Super Bowl. The incentive was money. If the team went to the Super Bowl the players and coaches would make more money than they had made all year. Unfortunately the head coach and the owner of the team didn't see eye to eye. Things began to deteriorate: the coaches fought amongst themselves, there were no attempts to review the games that the team lost or learn from past mistakes. Soon the mood was defeated. The team felt unsupported, players began to leave immediately after a game sometimes not waiting to even take a shower. It tore the team apart. They lost seven games in a row and went to last place.
Larson and LaFasto argue that personal success got elevated above the team goal.
However, the pursuit of personal success is a fact of life. Almost everyone in a team wants to succeed and every member of the team knows that they are as much in competition with their teammates as they are with other teams. But when individual goals are aligned with that of the team, it reinforces the shared vision. Understandably football players need to make money just like anyone else, yet how different the mood would have been if all the players and coaches had been inspired by one shared vision: to win the Super Bowl!