Competition is assumed to be motivating force that pushes all players to do their best. Organizations often seek to rely on internal competition (practicing relative performance ranking) to provoke employees’ efforts and spur creativity. The process surely leads to categorization of employees into winners and losers, but does not necessarily enhances overall organization effectiveness or financial performance. Some of the gaps in the outcome can actually be explained in the difference between Work Place Competition and Market Place Competition.
The contention is not to let go leveraging the benefits of competition, but to be conscious of its limitations. Create enough avenues for all well meaning employees to win and make it evident that collaboration and partnerships in the overall interest of organization also pays.
Reflect!!!
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do u mean"workplace competition may not deliver results comparable to free market competition"
ReplyDeleteworkplace competetion strategies r not as competent as free market competition strategies[in getting results].
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely agree with the above...
ReplyDeleteThe only point that I would like to make here is that in case of a workplace competition – the Players’ prime objective cannot be to be better than his/her competitor / colleague as in most cases the player has limited visibility about the overall competition’s relative performance level and like it’s mentioned above “the performance target is notional and often moving”. Moreover the final call of whether the player has turned out to be “better than the Competition” rests with a select group (Management) that makes the decision based on objective and subjective grounds. Taking this into consideration, the Players prime objective should ideally be – to give his or her best across all dimensions and strive to take standards of performance to the next level. This when done collectively will eventually benefit the organization.
There will be some degree of internal competition among employees in any organization. However, if a company chooses to aggressively promote internal competition it might create a work environment where employees will devote a significant amount of their time focusing on competing with their co-workers. This would result in a trust deficit between them which will affect their level of motivation to work collaboratively as ‘One Team’.
ReplyDeleteEffective collaboration can only happen if employees work together and trust each other. In order to enable this, the management of a company should clearly articulate when employees should compete and when they should collaborate. They can reward employees who share knowledge and information with their colleagues; and put together people with complementary skills in team(s).
The organization's prime objective can be considered as the CEO's objective which can be drilled down to sub-objectives down the hierarchy upto operational objectives at the granular level. In that sense, the objective part can be co-related.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as it involves 'people', it is important how well this framework is implemented & here role of 'Regulators' at workplace becomes key factor. This, in my opinion, is a top-most challenge & how transparent/ fair 'Results' are & how well 'Collaboration' is promoted.
At the end of it, people at the workplace should perceive the framework and its implementation 'right'. Managers at each level are the most important players to ensure this.
- Sonal
Hi Tushar
ReplyDeleteIt’s a great blog! I was reading somewhere about Tongal, a social media platform that uses crowdsourcing to invite and assimilate ideas from across the world into a ‘winning’ advertising. It‘s based on creating healthy competition between the talent and on de-politicizing decision making. I think is also in line with Steve Jobs’s idea of innovation that innovation results from having numerous ‘dots’ to connect and combine.