Work in the 21st century

[MidTowner]

And that's fine. I think everyone...well non delulu people know they are replaceable.  But there was once a sort of connection amongst colleague friends - I still see glimpses of it, but i see it more in some other offices where individuals had a history such as being hired together in same cohort or possibly had a connection already from before working at the place together (that one is sort of unfair to count tbh). In any event, I don't even think organizations care as much to foster it, realizing how transactional people are now treating work.

What's the right answer? Well I guess depends on the person.

That is indeed an excellent question. Having a team rather than just a collection of transactional employees is unlikely to happen by accident. Some of it is the employer's corporate culture, some of it is the local workplace culture (distinct from the corporate level), and some of it is down to the manager's hiring decisions--how much the candidate's "fit" with the team factors into the hiring decision. I don't think there is any magic formula, but it's certainly possible for employees to be more than just transactional numbers, and for the employer to be more than just a transactional job.

I have seen individual teams who were extremely cohesive, even though the broader workplace culture was characterized by disengagement and poor team dynamics. This in situations where team leads and low-level managers had little to no input into who was hired for or assigned to their teams.

What I mean to say is, I think it is up to individual managers, and not just in how well they select for "fit." People who are hired by the same organization, even for different functions, already have more in common than not, and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to work together in a cohesive way and feel more like a team and less like just a group of people selling their labour to the same organization. 

Managers need to make time and space for this to happen, and they need to model it themselves.