Corporate Competition as an Oxymoron

Alongside this theme of leadership is the concept of competition in the workplace. When potential clients reach out to me for internal gamification support, many of them ask me about competition in the workplace and how to properly implement it to improve workplace productivity and office dynamics.

Almost every company I talk with assumes that competition always makes things fun and is critical for a robust office culture. Unfortunately, while competition in the workplace can be very useful in different scenarios, it can often backfire and demoralize team morale in the long run.

The problem of competition in the workplace is that it is easy to measure the temporary surge in activities, especially among the top 10 percentile that usually drive a major portion of the measured metrics. However, it is more difficult to follow the gradually decreasing motivation among the other 90% of employees, as well as the anti-collaborative stress that competition...