Beware of competition overload105343.000000
Whipping up competitive spirit by driving teams to win at all costs is great for football. But too much competition in the workplace can sack collaboration and creativity, new research has found.
"The notion that 'winning isn't everything; it's the only thing' may help win football games, but it may be counterproductive when the goal is fostering creativity through team competition in the workplace," said Markus Baer, a management professor at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the study in the current Academy of Management Journal.
The experiment randomly assigned 280 university undergraduates, mostly men, into 70 four-member groups who were asked to generate original and practical ideas on two issues of student life.
To generate higher levels of competition, the groups were given different levels of potential rewards. Low-competition teams were told at the outset that members of groups whose ideas were judged to rank in the top 50 per cent in creativity would win a cash prize of $4 each and have their suggestions forwarded to the associate dean of the university.
Intermediate-competition groups were told that they had to be in the top 10 of most-creative teams to receive $20 each and have their ideas forwarded. High-competition groups were told that members of only one team judged to be the most creative would each be given $400 and receive a personal letter from the associate dean.
Video recordings of the teams in action showed the least collaboration among members of low-competition groups, which the researchers attribute to the fact that there was little incentive for individuals to build on the ideas of others. In the intermediate-competition teams, meanwhile, the added pressure to score near the top to get a reward led to a 20 per cent rise in collaboration, the researchers found.
But in teams that had an all-or-nothing big reward on the line, videos showed dominant players were less likely to listen to alternatives to their ideas and as a result the ideas produced by the teams were rated as almost identical in creativity to the intermediate groups.
"In an environment in which people are under threat, the group becomes more rigid and certain individuals within the team become more inclined to take over the decision-making process and reject the input of others," Prof. Baer said.
An example is what happened in many government agencies after the terrorist attacks of September, 2001: "The system became more autocratic, with certain people grabbing on to all the decision-making power and less likely to share information and build on each other's ideas."
However, another part of the study found that intense competition can have benefits in situations that shake up membership in teams, which frequently occurs in mergers or organizational shakeups.
The researchers shuffled the members of some of the groups halfway through the experiment. "When a newcomer joins a team from a rival group, the result may be what scholars call 'cutthroat co-operation,' " said study co-author Greg Oldham, a management professor at Tulane University.
"If competition is fierce, the intensity provides the impetus to accommodate a newcomer and thereby reap the creative benefits" from someone who might have a new insight to apply to the problem, Prof. Oldham said.
"But the overall message from the results is that if there is something at stake, people are more likely to overcome individual differences and see each other's ideas in a more positive light and more likely to help each other. But as an organization becomes extremely competitive, the environment will ultimately stifle creativity," Prof. Baer concluded.
The researchers are now doing a follow-up study to look at whether the competitive differences are as true for groups of women as they are for men.