Synergy or synergism most often refers to the phenomenon of two or more discrete influences or agents acting in common to create an effect which is greater than the sum of the effects each is able to create independently.
The opposite of synergy is antagonism, the phenomenon where two agents in combination have an overall effect which is less than the sum of their individual effects.
Synergy has origins as a theological term describing the cooperation of human effort with divine will. In the 1960s it was first used to describe supposed economies of scale in business, reappearing in the the 1990s as ...
