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Done well, it certainly can be a stress buster. However, it's usually done badly, which makes it a distration or worse.
I was once on a global team building course. We were outside after lunch, waiting for the next exercise to start. Somebody produced an American football and we were throwing it around, having fun, chatting - we were, in fact, team building. And then the boss and the 'facilitators' arrived, ruined the mood and made us do something stupid and boring. They had taken an excellent team building moment and destroyed it.
Fortunately, we did team building in the bar that evening, bitching about how the boss was a moron and the 'facilitators' were even bigger morons.
Bosses tend to forget that even the most enjoyable and successful fun activity is still work. They also tend to forget that the amount of work to be done doesn't change: my heart always sank at the idea of a team building thing because it meant I'd be working late for days afterward to catch up. (Bosses who remember this usually then schedule the team building for evenings or weekends ... which of course just makes things worse.)
