Why Competitive Workplaces May Be Hurting Your Productivity, According to Stanford

When employees aren’t pitted against each other, they’re more willing to take risks and do better work.

BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

The hard-ass boss who pressures staff, impossible working hours, colleagues desperately trying to out-compete each other, angry voices across the watercooler… all well-known, if tiresome, “office” tropes from TV and Hollywood. The thing is, some managers love to follow this leadership mode in real life, convinced it gets results (and that’s the only thing that matters: results!). New research from Stanford, however, suggests that creating a cooperative office environment may have plenty of hidden benefits, while competitive ones can actually limit productivity. 

The study, from organizational researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business, spins around the idea of autonomy at work—the ability of a person to feel in control of their choices and actions. Whether a workplace has a competitive versus a cooperative environment will play into how workers experience autonomy. The researchers theorized that cooperative models genuinely “liberate” workers compared to competitive ones, or situations that are “neither cooperative nor competitive.”

Think about this for a moment, and it makes good sense. A bullying leader, workers who tend to look out for their own needs instead of playing for the team—these, and other, competitive behaviors aren’t exactly going to make a staff member feel free to chart their own course, or propose unexpected new ideas. 

The data in the study shows that workers’ sense of autonomy goes up in “environments where their interests are aligned with others,” that is when everyone in a team feels they can succeed alongside everyone else. Whereas lower autonomy occurs in “environments where their interests are misaligned with others,” in other words workplaces where only some workers can succeed, or “achieve favorable outcomes at others’ expense.”

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This happens in competitive environments because the danger of “losing” forces workers to follow stricter self-interested paths, constraining their sense of choice and freedom to explore, Phys.org reported.

Meanwhile, in cooperative environments, the sense of a group “safety net” helps employees feel like they can make their own choices in a supportive environment—resulting in lower stress levels, and lower social threat levels, leading to higher job satisfaction and engagement, and lower intention to leave.

One of the paper’s authors, Valentino Chai, explained that cooperative workplaces boost “psychological safety—a sense that it’s OK to take risks without the fear of being criticized.”

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