When "Friendly" Competition Becomes Backstabbing Survival

An organization that relies upon individual goals or performance benchmarks to evaluate employees...needs to be careful to design competitions and structure comparisons that thwart the efforts of some workers to sabotage their colleagues. Otherwise, saboteurs may bring down everyone’s numbers — including their own.

Associate professor, Szu-chi Huang at the Stanford Graduate School of Business has been studying how competitions within the workplace materialize among larger teams. She explains that competition inside companies "is something that needs to be carefully structured and managed." And that while they do increase engagement, destructive effects can be had as well. 

Colleagues can grow preoccupied with proving that they are better than one another, especially, when competition is encouraged inside a professional work environment. According to Huang, this distracts from the larger goals of the group. 

One proposed solution for better in-house contests is fir companies to try to "restructure the comparison by matching employees who are at different phases of their careers instead of the same phase, for instance through a mentorship system...Or they could highlight the differences and uniqueness in each employee’s background, task, and project, and thus make the comparison less meaningful....

Sean Joyner via Archinect - News http://bit.ly/2ZbbsMD