In a standard Eco world, players need to exchange resources and services in order to achieve objectives and save time. The first thing you want to make is a store, so you get benefits from the skills' synergy as soon as possible. Moreover you want these exchanges to be fair, so that other players actually survive and grow with you. Exchanges is an important "ecosystem" in this game and we should keep it active and balanced. Side note here: exchanges don't necessarily mean trading with stores.
However, members of a team can share resources, infrastructures and skills required to achieve their goals without the need to exchange with others. In other words, they can be seen as a single player who has a lot of time and several skills, therefore fewer incentives to exchange with others. As expected, most teams I have seen in Eco adopted an independent behavior and failed to trade with the outside world unless they temporarily lacked specific resources. In all cases, it disrupts the exchange paths enough to make their neighbors leave. Moreover, many teams opened a single store to offer very disadvantageous exchange rates. This is like saying: "We don't really need anything, but if you want to be our slave, why not ?".
2- Teams increase economic inequality
While it is quite obvious to observe teams that are not trading, the other impacts are more subtle. In fact, many problems in Eco have roots in small events that happened days before.
Interestingly, Eco has mechanisms to maintain balance. For example, a carpenter is likely to pick logging and carpentry while the blacksmith will take mining and smelting. By the time the carpenter needs nails, the blacksmith can sell them. If you take smelting on the first day, it is likely no one will need your products until they catch up technologically. If the blacksmith has trouble acquiring an arrastra, the carpenter has a good reason to help by providing wood materials to the engineer. So Eco is filled with regulatory mechanisms for those who go too fast and incentive to help others who struggle to complete their project.
Now the problem is that teams tend to progress more rapidly than their neighbors. Better communication, proximity, tools, support strategies and sharing of crafting stations lead to rapid development. Since they depend less on others, there are fewer regulatory mechanisms to slow them down and incentive to help other players who struggle. While this difference doesn't matter much at first, experienced players probably noticed some desertion as the gap grows between a team and the solo players around. Another major wave of desertion strike the server when the team makes his first assembly line: it becomes clear to most nearby players that future industrial development will happen there. Motivation to continue is low at this point if the team has not shown any sign of cooperation earlier.
3- Teams reduce settling
Many games are based on competition : if we are not the first, we loose. Interestingly, a major difference between these games and Eco is the fact that you can win even if you are not the most active player, the one with the highest XP or the richest. This is because of the cooperative structure in Eco : you win if you are part of the big planet team. However, many players fail to understand this point and I often see people leaving right after they realize other players with the same skill are more successful. So the competitive approach remains a thing in Eco and this is something we need to take into account.
Players in teams tend to be more advanced in terms of skills and resources. Without obvious community support, it is reasonable to think new players will notice these advanced players and worry about whether they will have a fair chance to contribute, be passive observants or worse, economic slaves. The team might use their advantage to sell all the goods and compete with solo players. So having efficient teams without an obvious economic/social net on the server to support the other players is a bad combination.
How can teams prevent these impacts in Eco ?
The main problem of teams is they naturally adopt an independent behavior, which doesn't go well with the cooperative nature of an Eco server. Therefore, we must find ways to make sure this independence doesn't interfere with the community or replace the independent behaviors with cooperative ones.
Identify and isolate teams
First, it is good practice for team members to add a tag to their objectives or their names to identify them. It is also a good idea to settle relatively far from the others. This way, teams have less impact on the main economy and can rely on a strong community when they need something later. In fact, teams of 3 players and more could be well considered an independent town and choose a map location accordingly.
When possible, avoid settling near teams, especially if they have not shown signs of cooperation (hints: they have a huge territory for no apparent reason and made their own research).
As an administrator of server, you may take care in loading a map that allows two or more good town locations and indicate in the server's description where teams can settle.
Trading hero
Given the efficiency of a team, there are things you can do faster that the average player. This is a leverage you can use to do good. Some items are in high demand on the server right now ? Maybe you can produce a portion of it or provide tools for the players responsible to make the needed items. If another player holds a greedy monopoly, maybe you can build a store to make prices reasonable ? When providing stuff this way, don't forget to allow the players to make a fair exchange. If you are smart and lucky enough, you can actually help a nearby community and reap the extra bonus granted by the cooperation rewards set into this game.
Research
Teams are often researching faster than independent players and research is an easy way to share and work with the main community. Build a public library near the main community and lead a server wide effort. You made the books already ? Offer them to a community library. This reduces the economic inequality between your team and the other players and makes you work with them on a common objective. From an external point of view, there is nothing fun about giving raw resources to a team in exchange for completed research, especially if these resources are going to widen the gap between the team and the rest of the community.
If you find other people to be slow at contributing, perhaps it's a sign your nearby community is not healthy in some way (already). Maybe this is something you can help with.
DIY contributions rather than crush the competition
As a team, it's quite easy to crush the competition with better infrastructure and modules. But this is a short-term model that only leads to a boring server few days after. Focus instead on what is needed to keep new players in the game. Most often, servers suffer from a lack of basic items such as building blocks and upgrade modules. You can provide these easily with small automatic stores that operates without price margin. These stores sell a single or very limited list of items. The corresponding basic resources are bought, but you can also add items that you currently need. A common example of DIY store buys wood and sell hewn logs. Since fair prices usually contains a small margin for calories and your team likely has it's own source of food, you can bring back additional resources home every time you visit the DIY store to start a new batch of items.
Upgrade modules sold at cost price always help the economy and simple DIY stores are excellent to protect the solo players around against greedy players and those who play in a competitive fashion.
Create contracts and work parties
A lot of tasks do not require specialized skills (ex.: shoveling, transporting, placing). They can easily become contracts and work parties so your team can focus on skills that benefit the most your projects. Also, when you reach the top of a skill, you may invite other players to add their work to your tables through a work party to make them level up faster.
Revert back to trading
After several games within teams, I revert back to trading with my partners. We still share workshops and missions, but we don't give each other resources: we trade them fairly. This is the easiest way to keep an open stance with other players and improve the whole community. From time to time we might pool resources for common objectives, but everyone is offered to join (ex.: gold rush for mint). When my teammates help me gather resources by picking rocks or logs, I give them their share. They either use it to launch a work party at the nearby Fab Lab, use them at the local DIY store or sell them back to me in exchange for manufactured goods. They are really happy to do it since I adopted long ago a policy of zero profit margin at my store.
I do feel this approach is easily scalable (up to 7 players so far and there was still room for more). It even allows multiple players with the same skill to join up without triggering competitive behaviors, provided we share a workshop. This is what FabLabs are great for. In conclusion
Teams tend to behave as a single player with every skill and a lot of time. Without incentive to cooperate and with high team synergy, they disturb the equilibrium of cooperation and further create economic inequality on the server. Both phenomenon means death for a server. This can be solved easily if teams create ways to reduce the economic gap between them and the other players and create opportunities for exchanges and interactions. By abandoning their single-minded independent ways, they might discover that interactions with the other players are still a way to get more time and resources. After all, this is a cooperative game!
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