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> to try to get people to leave the team and join less effective teams

From a director-level perspective it probably makes sense to have one or two of your best people on each team, rather than some wholly excellent teams and some wholly mediocre teams.

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From the standpoint of providing skill-mentorship opportunities it makes sense. A few strong engineers on a team can really help everyone grow. Naturally personalities and preferences should be accounted for, however one of the best moves I ever made was to break up a "ninja squad" (what they called themselves) of high functioning devs when their big project wrapped up. The squad was small (3) and each person was very well liked by the entire engineering team (13). We had several green-field projects starting up, so none of them felt banished to the salt mines of legacy maintenance tasks for instance. The general quality and velocity improved across the teams and we gained more consistency in our codebase when it came to patterns.

The IBM Black Team is a notable counterexample that argues clustering your top performers together pays extremely effective dividends.

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