Spirited fight
Employers want the ‘maximum’ from their workers. If an employee is too comfortable, she is liable to cruise through the day and turn in adequate, but not necessarily great, work. Bosses looking to keep their employees innovative and hardworking offer rewards – be it money, recognition or something worthy that only the best worker can earn. To be the winner, employees will push themselves harder than they might otherwise.

Laurent Duperval of Duperval Consulting, an American-based company, says this can have the intended, positive effect. He believes competition in the workplace is usually a good thing. Healthy competition will cause workers to surpass themselves in order to achieve a goal that they might not attain otherwise.

Problems arise when the competition overshadows everything else, including personal enrichment. “It becomes an end instead of a means. Once employees start to compete just to compete, but there is no tangible benefit for the company, then it should stop,” Duperval says. “Competition has to yield something positive for the company and for the employees.”

Even the most competitive employees want the chance to gain something from the experience, whether or not they’re the number one player. Duperval believes that a system set up to punish more than to reward workers isn’t going to inspire the majority of the team.

“If you sell a product that only 10 companies in the world can buy and you have 10 sales people, at least five of them have no chance of winning,” Duperval explains. “On the other hand, if your product can be sold to 1,000 companies, but your average salesperson is only capable of closing 50 of them, then everybody can win. Those who work better or faster will close more than the others. With a competitive environment, maybe the average salespeople will close 60 sales instead of 50. Under these conditions, everyone wins.”