While many executive teams work hard to build teamwork, the excellent article about Citigroup in the New York Times over the weekend shows that getting along isn’t always such a great idea. The piece demonstrates the need to foster disagreement, even when that disagreement is painful and may cut into short-term results (and bonuses).

The piece says that the person who was in charge of evaluating the risks being assumed by two major parts of Citigroup was good friends with the two executives who ran those groups, to the point that he’d often wait outside the office for 45 minutes so they could drive home together. Not surprisingly, the risk executive seldom said no to his friends, who proceeded to put Citigroup into such a precarious position that this grand institution is having to plead for government help to avoid disappearing.

How much better would it have been to follow the model of Tom Watson Jr. when he was CEO of IBM? Watson said he liked “harsh, scratchy people” and surrounded himself with people who would disagree with him, who would challenge him, who would fight him tooth and nail when they thought he was wrong.

Sometimes, as Citigroup has learned to its chagrin, less camaraderie equals more safety.