Survey says competition among employees on the rise

Admit it. When your co-worker gets praise from above, you feel a twinge of jealousy. Perhaps it even pushes you to work a little longer and harder, in hopes of capturing the interest of those managers yourself.

Some say competition among employees is helpful because it keeps workers working and interested in their jobs.

Others believe competition has gotten to dangerously high levels. Jobs are at stake now, that argument goes, and people are worried somebody else might get promoted while they get the boot -- and it's to the point that some of them are sabotaging their perceived rivals.

More than half of the 150 executives surveyed recently by Accountemps, a temporary staffing service for accounting and finance employees, said competition among employees is more prevalent now than 10 years ago. In an economy like this one, it's tempting to file that in the "no kidding" folder.

But competition, good and bad, is really a result of company culture. Do managers push their employees to compete against one another? Or do they encourage teamwork in an atmosphere in which employees challenge themselves rather than try to beat out fellow workers?

Some competition among co-workers is a good thing. It provides us all with a feeling of self-worth, says Bruce Pomerantz, a psychologist who recently has been counseling many anxiety-ridden workers. Competition drives us to get things done. It serves as an incentive to excel. But there are different kinds of competition: individual internal competition, and that of a whole team.

Promoting team play

Recently New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated details of stories, presumably to get ahead. A competitive culture like a newsroom, where byline counts and page displays matter, could indeed push reporters to cut corners and dig themselves into a hole of lies and deception in an effort to get ahead of co-workers.

In those companies that have had a strong team dynamic, the competitive incentive works differently.

"I think organizations understand that if you reward teams, you promote team play. When you celebrate team success, you have people collaborating as a team dynamic rather than an individual," said Brett Good, district president for Accountemps in San Francisco.

Allan Liska recently came from a department at WorldCom Inc. (now renamed MCI), where the competition was team-based. He worked there for six years on a small team of techies. They made it through five rounds of layoffs together before they were all cut loose last June.

"You'd think in an environment like that, there would be a lot more competition because of the fear of rounds of layoffs coming up. But there really wasn't. No one was trying to be a standout person just so they didn't get laid off next time," he said. "It was a hunker-down mentality where we wanted to help people on the team out. We didn't want to see anyone go."

The competition he did feel at WorldCom was with the sister team based in Upstate New York.

'Have to help everyone'

Today, Liska works for Symantec Corp. in the network operations center. He again feels members of his team of techies work together more than compete against each other. He likens his group to the cube dwellers in the "Dilbert" cartoon strip. Everyone pops up to talk to someone else about a problem.

"When you're in that role, there really isn't much competition. You have to help everyone out. You have to solve problems together because everyone has different skills," he said.

That is obviously a positive approach to workplace competitiveness, as opposed to competing solely on an individual basis. The latter way of operating becomes so internally focused that people wind up taking their eyes off the clients they serve, he said.

"They're more worried about outperforming Sally or Bob. The next thing you know, they create their own reality in lost revenue, productivity, opportunities."

As in the case of one telecommunications salesman in the D.C. area. This man's team is very independent. Its members go after the clients they want. But once one of them gets a nibble, and enters that client into a database, that client is his. Hands off.

That is, until competition gets the better of them. One employee has started to circumvent the rules, and will work to get clients others have already claimed.

"Then he steals your time because you're protecting yourself," said the salesman. "It angers me very much because it's like taking money out of my pocket. I'm wasting time, making sure to protect my client."

Others know this is going on, he said. But management, considering this good competition, provides no help. "As long as this person is hitting the numbers, nothing is going to happen to this person," he said.

'Maybe I'm the idiot'

The salesman likes his job. He trusts most of his co-workers, and enjoys a little good competition -- after all, he chose a job in sales. But when it gets to this level, it is frustrating, and causes anxiety.

Because he plays by the rules, he starts to wonder if "maybe I'm the idiot. I won't change, but I do wonder."

If management does not discourage bad competition, or actually encourages it, that can be harmful to all.

"It's good to be challenged," Pomerantz said. "But if a boss is the one pushing the competition, and he or she pushes too hard or makes goals unattainable, it can become an unhealthy environment, where these goals promote excessive anxiety."