Leadership in Competitive Settings

Perhaps the reason that competition was not cited as a part of anyone’s personal best leadership experience is because it can be an exhausting, frustrating situation (Kouzes & Posner, 2002). There are myths here in Silicon Valley about companies and teams achieving superior performance by competing against one another with precisely the same mission–I have rarely witnessed this effect–in fact, I have observed quite the opposite. When executive leaders give two teams similar tasks and encourage them to compete for resources within the organization, the outcome is usually conflict and inefficiency. Obviously, competition has its place in the marketplace but it is often a suboptimal way of managing and leading in the organizational setting; groups should have small and defined overlap in mission and responsibilities.

In organizational settings, there is a subtle difference between collaboration and cooperation. Collaboration is active participation with others to achieve a common goal, while cooperation may be passive participation in the process. Contrast collaboration and cooperation with competition. In competitive environments, teams are not supporting a vision as we see in neither cooperation nor working toward completing a common goal as we see in collaborative efforts. The essence of competition is that there can be only one winner, which is a zero sum game that is not advantageous in organizations where a persistent relationship between groups and group members must be maintained. The persistent relationship of team members within the context of the organizational boundaries sets up the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario, which limits the payoff. Otherwise, that is, absent the boundaries of the organization and limited resources, competition might provide a reasonable alternative, as it does in the marketplace.

Reference

Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2002). The leadership challenge (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.