October 10, 2009

Competition: No matter who wins, everyone loses

Ted was a recent graduate of the fiercely competitive MIT College of electrical Engineering. Ted was an electronics guru and was consistently ahead of the curve. At the top of his class, Ted graduated with honors and accepted an offer from Premier Consulting, the best IT consulting firm in the region. At work Ted excelled in the fast paced and cutthroat environment of this dynamic company just as he had in his rigorous courses at school. From the first day, Ted was told that Premier, like many consulting firms, had an “Up or Out” policy for advancement. If Ted excelled in developing his skills, forging strong (and profitable) client relations, and efficiently completed his work, he would be on his way to Senior Associate before the year was out. Ted also understand that out of his start class of ten, only five Junior Associates would make Senior Associate If he failed to keep up with the rigorous standards set by his colleagues, he would be out of a job when the yearend evaluations rolled around.

As the months went on Ted began to fall behind. His analytical skill development lagged behind his peers and his client relations struggled due to his shy nature. Wondering how he could stay ahead of the game and retain his position in the company, Ted began developing a Macro in his free time in an effort to automate the cumbersome analytics process he both struggled with and loathed. After three weekends spent programming away in his basement he finally completed his Macro. It turned out that by using this macro he could complete his analytics in one third the time it used to take him and at least twice as quickly as his peers. Though he briefly considered making the macro available to the rest of the company he decided against it. He recognized the fact that just as distributing a study guide to the rest of his Electromagnetism class would have damaged his chances of staying on top of the curve, so to would dolling out his Macro hurt his chances for promotion. In all reality, it was his only edge over the other first year employees. Sure this program could have saved the company countless work hours, but Ted needed this job and wasn’t going to sacrifice his livelihood for the good of a multimillion dollar corporation.

The afore mentioned scenario, though fictitious, is being played out on a daily basis in firms around the nation, especially in those firms with highly competitive cultures. Likewise, in schools worldwide, competition in the classroom is molding the workers of tomorrow into a cutthroat workforce where loyalty to oneself seems to be the only bond not worth breaking. Though educational systems that grade students on a curve and put student in direct competition with one another purport to encourage excellence and prepare students for the real world, they do more harm than good as they stifle growth of knowledge and learning on an individual and group basis and encourage a self serving bias. Furthermore, this competitive grooming in school carries over into the work place where real life ramifications like wages, bonuses, and advancement continue to enhance the problems caused by competition pushing employees to commit unproductive, unethical and even illegal actions to maintain their standing relative to their peers.

Competition can be defined as “rivalry between two or more persons or groups for an object desired in common, usually resulting in a victor and a loser” (Shindler 13). The key component is that the desired object or goal is mutually exclusive to the opposing parties and the success of one group inevitable requires the failure of the other and vice versa. Competition has been engrained in American culture for centuries and can be seen in even the most pedestrian of activities ranging from winning a little league game to one’s successful navigation out of a crowded parking lot. Though some might say that these contests are trivial or “just for fun”, the truth is that competition has seeped so far into American culture that it has rotted the American educational system and corrupted the American work place and way of business.

Start with the Education. The American Educational system has long been touted as the gold standard and has been emulated the globe over. At the heart of this institution is competition. Every day students compete with one another for scores, grades, and recognition. These rewards are scarce by nature as a way of encouraging students who achieve and implicitly (or explicitly) shaming those who do not.

The most basic reward used by every teacher in America is a grade. Generally in the form of a letter, this grade serves as a de facto currency for appraising and comparing the relative worth of students. That is to say, no one can quantify the true value of a “B” only conclude that it is better than a “C” and worse than an “A”. Though tag lines like “complete mastery of the material” and “above average understanding of concepts” are often attached to these glyphs in a half-hearted effort to provide foundation to their existence, more often than not one’s grade would determine that he officially has “below average understanding of concepts” and not the other way around.

One of the more prolific methods of assigning grades and reinforcing competition is through the grading curve. Often the standard at most universities, the grade curve represents educational competition in its purest form. The infamous “curve” is based upon the belief that grades in a class should be perfectly distributed along the bell curve with the average grade (usually a B- or B) assigned by the professor. When the final scores are tallied the professor fits the natural distribution of grades to the curve so no matter what, the scores average to that designated “B” average.

To clarify with an extreme example, if every student in a class did not answer a question wrong all year, proving that the entirety of the class had an extremely strong understanding of the material, every student in the class would receive the average grade of “B”. Though unlikely to occur, this situation illustrates the true nature of grading on the curve and its more sinister implications. That is that grading on a curve does not, in fact, test one’s mastery of material or level of knowledge, but simply one’s ability to compete with and defeat one’s fellow classmates.

In the previous scenario where all classmates have perfect understanding of the material, the ONLY way to get an “A” would be to sabotage their understanding or subvert their ability to demonstrate their understanding on tests in an effort to reduce their scores, thus lowering the average and leaving you above the curve. Though this situation is decidedly out of the norm, it is not so farfetched to imagine a similar one occurring in an easier class where a large majority of the students have high grades and an arbitrary one or two points can mean the difference between an “A” and a “B” even if the “B” student is just as knowledgeable as the “A”.

This brings about the question of the role of education systems in general. The more cynical (probably those picked first for kickball) might argue that the roll of today’s education is to rank and order students and to weed out all those considered below average. This is simply not the case. Though the average university student might argue otherwise, the goal of the education system is to increase the knowledge of all students, whether they are especially gifted or not. This fact is often forgotten when competition for grades dominates the educational landscape.

Though proponents of competition in the classroom argue that it increases motivation to learn, numerous studies have shown that students retain less information when a competitive element is brought to the situation. John Shindler writes in Transformative Classroom Management that “competition brings a variable into the equation that shifts the participants’ attention from the task itself (learning) to the cost of their performance in the task (the grade)” and that competition will “increase the attention that is placed upon doing what it takes to win, and decrease the attention placed upon learning for its own sake”. (Shindler 2)

If this “do what it takes” attitude is reinforced year in and year out throughout a person’s major periods of learning and growth, one would not expect a student to stop this competitive attitude after graduation and upon his entering the workforce. Shindler writes, “competition in life is self imposed…to say that the ‘real world’ is inherently competitive is for the most part a myth. Moreover, to say that we are preparing students for the real world by putting them in artificially constructed competitive situations is to impose our world view on them…we as educators create a more or less competitive future world by the way we encourage our students to think and treat each other”(Shindler 1). And just as damaging as competition can be in the classroom, its negative effects carry over and can be felt tenfold in the workplace and account for major losses in productivity and an environment that fosters unethical and illegal behavior.

The ill effects of competition in the workplace can be easily illustrated by examining the company involved in one of the biggest corporate scandals of all time, Enron. A self proclaimed “energy broker” Enron’s tale of success and subsequent fall from grace is the perfect case study on the effects of an ultra competitive culture. For Enron, competition was everything and Enron’s CEO and President Jeffry Skilling cultivated his workers to embrace and thrive on competition. Skilling’s motto was “Do it right, do it now and do it better” (Sims and Brinkmann 244). He encouraged his employees to be aggressive, innovative, and push the limits when it came to rules and boundaries even within the company.

In an effort to encourage productivity and innovation, Enron utilized a forced ranking system in order to determine the greatest and worst producers. At the end of the year, the bottom twenty percent of the workers were laid off. Therefore, every worker was in direct competition with one another just to keep their own jobs. Worse still, the evaluation process utilized peer grading to determine who was where in the ranking. Over time, distrust and paranoia built up among employees resulting in backstabbing and political games that had major disruptive effects on the company.

Over time this push to continuously stay ahead of the curve led workers to push ethical limitations further and further. Bribery, extortion, and flat out lying to investors became the norm in order to maintain earnings. As the culture eroded, so too did Enron’s business model as the phantom earnings piled up and were finally exposed for the fraud they represented. When the company was finally exposed, hundreds of employees lost their life savings and even more investors were left with nothing when the stock plummeted to zero. These were the results of this so called ingenious culture of competition.

Though executive management had many constructs in place to encourage this competition, for the majority of Enron’s employees this cut-throat attitude was developed in school. Sims and Brinkmann wrote that “Skilling hired only Ivy-league graduates with a hunger for money that matched his. He hired people who considered themselves the best and the brightest and were out to forward their own causes.” (Sims and Brinkmann 251). Perhaps if teambuilding and information sharing was stressed at Harvard instead of a “do whatever it takes” strategy, the Enron scandal might never have occurred. But whether it was the competitive emphasis in school or on the job that created Enron’s culture, it is clear that the ultra competitive strategy did not work and was ultimately the source of much woe for people worldwide.

So what is the answer, just eliminate testing in schools and pay all employees the same as long as they show up for work? Clearly motivation is still needed to inspire people, it’s simply a question of what behavior is being rewarded. Instead of rewarding people for individual achievement or mastery, schools and firms need to reward constituents for how much they contribute to the achievement of the institutions goals as a whole. In schools, this goal would be to instill as much knowledge into students as possible. Therefore, a student should be rewarded for adding to discussion, helping a fellow student with difficult concept, and in general doing anything to promote to spread of knowledge to him and his classmates. In this new grading system people would not jealously guard information and attempt to sabotage other students because helping others would also further your own interests.

Likewise in the workplace, employees should be rewarded for contributing to the long term goals of the company. This includes the training and mentoring of employees to make them as effective as possible. Instead of having employees in direct competition with one another, if employees were rewarded for working together to make the company as good or as profitable as possible, not only would the culture strengthen but the company’s bottom line would improve as well.

Whether in school or on the job it is clear that more cooperation is necessary to progress the interests of this nation. No longer can we pit one man against another as an attempt to provide motivation. The results of such a narrow minded philosophy are evident both in the grade obsessed classroom and the head to head workplace. Though winners and losers are thought to be established, with this mindset, everyone loses in the long run with.

Works Cited

Balderrama, Anthony. "When does competition with a co-worker go too far?" Careerbuilder.com. Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

Kohn, Alfie. "No Contest: A Case against Competition." New Age Journal (1986): 18-20. Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

Meisler, Andy. "The Ethics of Forced Ranking." Workforce.com. July 2003. Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

Shindler, John. "Examinging the Use of Competition in the Classroom." Transformative Classroom Management. Allen Bacon Pub. Web. 30 Sept. 2009. .

Sims, Ronald R., and Joannes Brinkmann. "Enron Ethics." JSTOR. July 2003. Web. .

1 comment:

  1. I thought this post was really interesting. I recently read an article similar to this-about how all children now receive trophies just for participating. Everyone gets the same things, whether they were the MVP or never saw the field. This may be an exaggeration, and I think both extremes are bad. I definitely see your argument against competition, but hanging a kid a trophy just for minor participation may lead to expectations of rewards regardless of results.

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