Jack Welch, the legendary General Electric CEO, was infamous for firing the bottom 10% of his workforce every year, without exception. The company’s market cap rose substantially during Welch’s tenure, but his “rank and yank” ritual was divisive.
If you knew your job was always on the line, the logic went, you would push harder and generate results. Yet what did this approach do to the employees who had to constantly compete with each other to keep their jobs?
New research by PhD student Valentino Chai and Nir Halevy, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, provides some answers. Although past research suggests that competitive work environments may light a fire under employees, Chai and Halevy find that they may also be experienced as constraining relative to more cooperative work environments. Cooperative environments, by contrast, increase feelings of autonomy, which can generate a cascade of benefits, such as increased motivation and well-being.
“Autonomy is such a fundamental need for people, and we didn’t really know before this research how everyday aspects of work — collaboration and competition — influence autonomy,” Halevy says. “Our findings show that employees feel suffocated by endless competition, and everyone pays a cost.”
The researchers started with surveys. They asked a range of people — Division 1 college athletes, employees from various organizations, and federal workers from 24 agencies — how cooperative or competitive they considered their teams and workplaces. They also assessed their feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation.
In all three groups, those who considered their environment more cooperative expressed higher levels of autonomy and intrinsic motivation. “We have these three very distinct sample populations, from federal agencies to collegiate sports teams,” Halevy says. “And in every case, we find the same pattern.”
Safe for Work
To test the causal link behind these effects, the researchers ran a variety of experiments where they could control whether the task was cooperative, competitive, or conducted independently. In one scenario, for instance, participants were asked to match pictures. In the cooperative version, players received a bonus only if their choices matched. In the competitive version, one player received a bonus when their choices matched, while the other received a bonus when their choices were mismatched. Another experiment involved negotiation scenarios that featured many versus few shared interests.
Across all experiments, participants in the cooperative conditions consistently reported greater feelings of autonomy than those in the competitive or independent conditions. (Competition did not consistently harm autonomy, but cooperation consistently increased it.) Though the task itself was identical in each case, the social context of how it was accomplished was enough to alter people’s feelings of freedom.
Underpinning these results is the psychology at play in cooperative and competitive environments. In the former, outcomes are shared and workers succeed or fail together. This mechanism creates strong incentives to support rather than undermine coworkers. In turn, this reduces pressure to sabotage or criticize others’ work.
“Cooperation promotes psychological safety — a sense that it’s okay to take risks without the fear of being criticized,” Chai says. “The opposite of that are the feelings of stress and threat promoted in competitive environments. This sense of threat narrows attention, which narrows the options that people think are available to them.”
Breaking Free
In competitive environments, the prospect of losing pushes people to act along a more rigid path of self-interest. They feel more constrained in their actions and less free to explore. This connection was notable in the survey of federal employees: Those who reported working in cooperative environments reported lower stress and felt less threatened, which predicted a higher sense of autonomy. These same employees also reported greater job satisfaction, higher engagement with their work, and lower intentions to leave their agency or the government.
“This is one of the key takeaways,” Chai says. “Autonomy is linked to numerous positive outcomes: greater commitment, less burnout, and greater well-being, which can lead to greater productivity.” While highly competitive environments may generate short-term performance gains, these come at the expense of the benefits created in cooperative environments.
One way to integrate cooperation and competition, Halevy suggests, is to compartmentalize competition in the workplace to well-defined times or within clear boundaries, while setting cooperation as the default in all other settings and times. Cooperative work can be cultivated through incentives that align employee outcomes — shared goals, collaborative rewards, and cultures where helping a colleague doesn’t come at personal cost. In these environments, workers who support each other are rewarded for doing so.
These insights are valuable for individuals seeking autonomy in their jobs as well as for leaders concerned with the sense of freedom their employees feel, to say nothing of the benefits that radiate from this feeling.
“Competitive environments are threatening to people. You’re worried about being criticized, undermined, about falling behind, and you feel vigilant,” Halevy says. “Feeling like you’re partaking in an endless tournament with others is harmful for your well-being. Organizations can help people feel greater freedom by designing more cooperative work environments.”
