Most team-building exercises, sometimes billed as corporate retreats, have always seemed to me to be a colossal waste of time.  These are grin-and-bear-it off-sites that people have to put up with because someone high up on the food chain thought it was a good idea.

I have been through a lot of these, and it always seemed that they had little connection with the real work that people, and actual work teams, do on the job. In fact, many of them have so little to do with building a team environment that you have to wonder just why anyone would take time and spend good money to force people to go through such nonsense anyway.

So, as a critic of these supposed bonding experiences, I’m not surprised when one goes terribly wrong. Case in point: a story this week in The Washington Post titled “Team-Building or Torture? Court Will Decide.”

The details of this story are amazing. “No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo [Utah] office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss,” the Post story says. “There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the ‘team-building exercise,’ that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.”

The Post story continues: “And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: ‘You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.’ What’s at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers—just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects—is the question of intent.”

It’s a story that has to be read to be believed, but it gets to something that has always bothered me: Team-building exercises like these are more about getting people to follow along blindly—to engage in groupthink—than they are in really getting people to work as a team. A better approach might be what SAP does, bringing people from all around the company together to get to know one another, swap ideas and break down barriers to collaboration.

I’m not sure how anyone, at any company, anywhere, could possibly think that waterboarding is an appropriate team-building exercise, but that’s what groupthink can do for you. It pushes people to take leave of their senses and engage in behavior in a team setting that they wouldn’t stand for if left to think about it on their own. In other words, it’s not so much team building as it is team bullying—and bullying in any form has no place at work.