Competition Can Destroy Organizational Team Building

Employing the power of teams and team building by organizations has the potential to empower employees to achieve an organization’s goals.  Many team building events utilized within organizations wrongly borrows from competitive nature of teams from the sporting world.  Teams are often placed in competitive environments and encouraged to compete with coworkers as a mechanism to motivate and enhance performance.

This concept while it appears to be straightforward has one major flaw.  Teams and team building is not about competition it is about cooperation.  Team building is meant to facilitate an organization’s success and enable team members to achieve desired goals.  Competition encourages the concept of “win at all costs”.

Competition plays on the basic primal instinct that exists in us all.  Everyone wants to be a winner and be perceived as being successful in life.  Introducing competition into a team building exercise will not only encourage the “win at all costs” attitude in some team members, it will destroy the underlying principle of team building.  Team building is seen as facilitating the cooperation amongst team members to facilitate achieving goals and completing the assigned task.

Having teams focus on winning means other teams will lose.  In an organization where efforts are being made to motivate employee performance having employees feel they are not good enough to “win” bestows a sense of failure.  Is this the attitude that employees should have within an organization?

In a competitive environment, the “win at all cost” attitude is greater in some team members than others.  This eventually leads to unethical or shady practices that destroy any sense of trust and well-being within an organization.  If individuals are perceived as being unethical by their peers or that unethical behaviour is a mechanism for success, many employees will doubt their involvement with the organization and staff turnover may increase.

Team building should result in coworkers liking each other better, and should foster the development of a much deeper appreciation for the organization.  Cooperation, not competition enables success.  Cooperation allows people to feel good about their work and about the organization as a whole.

Competition lowers performance.  While competition allows for certain individuals to have the appearance of success, it creates an environment where the majority of employees appear to fail.  As a result, many employees fear the pressures of competing because they fear failing.  This lowers overall performance in a majority of the employees within the organization.

Team building is not about individual successes.  Team building is about enabling the success of the organization.  Team members should have a sense of pride from working together towards meeting a common goal.  Team building should build upon and foster the cooperative spirit within a team rather than promote the competitive nature of individuals.  Team building creates strong and successful organizations.

Conclusion: Leave competition out of team building exercises.  Develop effective team building techniques and practices that enable a cooperative workplace where employees help each other out.  The results of such team building exercise will ensure not only the success of the teams but the success of the organization.

In business there are other factors to watch for which you can read about in Getting Your Business Off The Ground.