Early on a Friday morning in May, 150 Mercy Hospital emergency room workers and ambulance squad members gathered at a rustic spot in Fayette County, far from their frenetic daily work environment.

	Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Mike Mohr, right, director of the Shooting Academy at Nemacolin Woodlands, helps David Becker, 7, of Maryland, on the course. At rear are James A. Basinger, instructor at the academy, and Ward Burton, a NASCAR driver who formed the Ward Burton Wildlife Foundation, a group that works with youth to educate them about the outdoors.. Click photo for larger image.

After coffee, rolls and conversation, they split into four-person teams, loaded their rifles and hit the nearby scenic trails to point and shoot their guns -- at sporting clays, biodegradable targets set off by machines at various shooting stations. The objective was not to find out who had the best shot but to encourage relaxation and camaraderie among a group that typically spends its days immersed in trauma.

"It's strictly to build relationships between the ambulance services and Mercy, so an ambulance driver could be shooting alongside an ER physician," said Robert Rathi Jr., EMS development specialist for the hospital who has organized the daylong event the past five years at the Nemacolin Shooting Academy.

Team-building exercises have been around for decades, but in recent years, such excursions have become big business. While there's no official source to gauge the growth, the anecdotal evidence shows organizations are spending huge sums to send employees off-site for sports, games and activities designed to help them forge bonds that will ultimately improve teamwork and productivity back in the office.

Whether the investment in team-building pays off is debatable, but that hasn't slowed the number of companies, nonprofits and other groups giving it a shot. And the more action, it seems, the better.

Indeed, as team-building retreats go, shooting at sporting clays in the woods is actually one of the tamer options available. Groups that want a lot more sizzle can try fire walking, speedway stunt driving or indoor skydiving.

"It's about bringing a team together, making people closer and encouraging and helping each other," said Josh Berman, vice president of Thrillseekers Unlimited.

Berman's Las Vegas-based business was launched in 1992 to package "extreme" vacations, but now it generates 70 percent of its business from corporate team-building events, Berman said.

Thrillseekers' offerings range from paint-ball and indoor bungee-jumping for $75 per person to "upper end" events such as stunt driving or NASCAR racing at $600 per person.

Longtime client Princeton Review, the company best known for test preparation materials for college entrance exams, last year asked Thrillseekers to arrange a team-building outing in Maui, Hawaii, that included competitions among employees on an all-terrain vehicle course and indoor skydiving in a vertical wind tunnel where wind speeds exceeded 125 miles per hour.

Such high-adrenaline events appeal to many businesses, Berman said, because it's unlikely anyone on the team has much expertise in such activities.

"While doing something different that no one's ever done, it puts everyone on even ground," Berman said. Comany softball teams are great, he added, "but sometimes they're skewed because one guy has been a softball star for 20 years and another can hardly hit the ball."

The Go Game, a San Francisco company, develops customized, Web-based problem-solving games for teams of co-workers to play out of the office at venues as diverse as beaches and malls, using cell phones to obtain instructions. Clients have included Microsoft, Frito-Lay and Verizon Communications.

Teams are assigned such tasks as producing a 20-second video advising new employees on how to get a raise, in which one team member plays the boss, one works the camera and the others play the roles of employees. Later, the whole company views all the videos and votes for the best.

Prices have ranged from $2,800 for a game planned for 30 people in San Francisco to $19,500 for a game for 300 people in New York City, said Go Game spokeswoman Anjali Jameson.

"The game breaks down social and personal barriers that keep co-workers from interacting on a more comfortable and fluid level," Jameson said.

At the Nemacolin Shooting Academy, it costs about $102 per person to shoot 100 targets over the course of three hours, with discounts offered to groups.

The nonprofit Mercy Hospital organizes its annual shooting event there but participants pay their own fee of $80, which includes meals, weapon rental if necessary and ammunition.

The academy hosts two to three corporate team-building events per month, said Michael Mohr, its director. Other local participants have included groups from Bayer Corp., Nationwide Insurance and the accounting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Some groups combine a few hours of shooting with nine holes of golf at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort. Because most people show up for a team-building event with little if any experience in shooting, the academy provides instructors to help novices load their ammunition and learn how to hold a rifle.

"Everyone can do this and have fun," Mohr said. "It's more difficult to be a golfer for the first time."

People also like it, Mohr said, because "it's thrill and skill without the kill.''

After shooting, some groups stay for wild game dinners at a lodge near the course. Some picnic along the course and, during cold weather, shooters can stop along the course for coffee in gazebos that are warmed by pot-belly stoves.

Even inexperienced shooters like employee team outings, Mohr said, "because you get to make noise and break targets and someone else cleans up your mess."

"Those who aren't experienced find it invigorating," said Mercy's Rathi. "When they fire a weapon for the first time and break that first target, it's just an invigorating feeling of success and completion."

As he observes team outings, Mohr notices distinct contrasts in how people with different jobs approach the shoot.

"If we have an accounting department versus an IT department, the computer people always analyze the distance before they shoot," Mohr said. "The engineers do that, too. The accountants just stand and stare."

Some question whether all the money flowing into team-building these days is worth it -- at least if fostering significant change back at the office is the ultimate goal.

"You have to ask yourself, 'What's the business purpose behind the activity, and will the activity generalize back to the work setting?' " said Robert Kelley, adjunct professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. "There are a number of exercises built around scavenger hunts ... or desert survival or moon survival, but the question is, how often do we do that at work?"

Team-building activities can be positive, Kelley said, "if they help people view each other in more dimensions than just work and highlight talents people have that they can't demonstrate at work. People might then say, 'Hey, this person is more than a one-dimensional accounting person.' "

But Kelley does not believe they transform organizations "My guess is many of these things fall more into the category of helping people get to know each other, or as a quasi-reward," he said.

Ruth Gmehlin, partner with Trillium Teams Inc., a consulting firm in Ottawa, Canada, said many team-building events may be fun outings but don't necessarily result in getting more out of employees once they are back in the work environment.

"If you go rock climbing, it's easy to say that was Monday, and Tuesday you're back at the office," Gmehlin said.

They can pay off when they are designed specifically to parallel work tasks and goals, she said. But with many companies trimming budgets, such events are becoming more of a luxury and managers who plan them have to make them more practical, she said.

"If it's just a day for having fun, that's OK, but there's probably no return on investment," Gmehlin said.