Many of us love competition and, more important,
winning. Competition drives us toward our goals and motivates us to improve our
performance, while the prestige and power that come from winning can provide a
powerful morale booster. What’s more, winning increases testosterone and
dopamine hormones, which, in turn, increases our confidence and willingness to
take risks, and thus our chances of further success.
At the same time, the need to win can blind us to
ethical considerations. It’s a potential problem in all kinds of areas:
colleagues who have a strong rivalry at work, managers who need to make their
numbers for the quarter, even political parties that spend campaign funds to
attract votes. A common theme in these situations is that there are only a few
winning slots — and maybe just one — with massive stakes in terms of money,
advancement, and fame.
What’s often driving this fierce
competition is the knowledge that our performance is being assessed not in
absolute terms but in comparison with others’. In the workplace, such
“rank-and-yank” methods — also known as the vitality curve, forced rankings,
and stacking systems — are regularly used to judge performance, whereby, say,
the top 20% of employees are categorized as high performers and the bottom 10%
face redundancy. Similarly, the bell-curve grading in an MBA classroom ensures
that students are categorized and graded relative to peers, without considering
their overall performance.
Source: HBR December 12, 2018
