Unhealthy employee competition in the workplace—How to prevent or deal with it
If your employees are reeling from the effect of toxic competition, it’s never too late to remedy it. Also, the best time to sensitize your employees to toxic competitiveness is before it happens. So, whether you’re seeking to prevent or deal with unhealthy employee competition, the following steps will help.
Prioritize rewarding personal contributions to team success
Competition isn’t the problem but unhealthy competition is. To keep it healthy, employees are encouraged to give their best to team success rather than individual success when they are rewarded based on that. When employees understand that no individual success is reckoned above team success, they are geared to work together and give their best to it.
It also eliminates the chances that a team member would hoard relevant information that could contribute to team success. This means that structures that link take-homes and incentives to individual ranking and performance must be abandoned for more team-focused ones.
Invest in organizational coaching
When employees and managers are enrolled for coaching, the coaches work with them to unpack the current position they are in and work with them to become better employees. For instance, if your employees already suffer from unhealthy competitiveness, coaching can help them redirect their focus. They get to see how their job isn’t tied to their self-worth and how prioritizing team wins over personal wins is still a win-win for everyone.
On the other hand, coaching can help organizations prevent unhealthy competition by helping employees understand their individual power to achieve collective results, rather than prioritizing personal gain. A deep sense of self-worth helps them see other employees as tag team members rather than enemies.
Re-evaluate performance metrics
In a case of toxic workplace competition, it’s easy to have a culture of winners and losers, where some see themselves as winners and others see themselves as losers. The existing performance metrics are often responsible for this. With employees feeling less of themselves a lot is already at stake. To prevent or deal with this, workplace leaders must re-align their performance metrics to accommodate occasional shortcomings. Since it’s not possible to hit 100% of a set target all the time, adjusting metrics to 70% and above for instance, will put less competitive pressure on employees working to attain that goal.
Discourage and enforce sanctions on sabotaging behavior
When employees know that there are sanctions in place for talking down or trying to sabotage other people’s work, they’re not likely to engage in such behavior. There are different scenarios in a work setting when a competitive employee could behave unethically to earn personal rewards. Encourage employees to speak up about such behavior and not ignore them, and ensure the appropriate sanctions are enforced to discourage such behavior.
Prioritize a culture of mutual respect
When employees have mutual respect for one another, it’s unlikely to see them engage in cut-throat competitiveness. Everyone understands the critical roles they all play to achieve organizational success, hence they value the input of others and respect their contributions.
