This post is motivated from the thread "Employee Ranking Systems", but is
not directly related to ranking. It is about competition. The following
intrigued me a lot.
>Most people respond to competition. In the face of competition a person
>is faced with two choices: Compete as hard as you can, or get off the
>playing field. That is the whole premise of a business: Compete with
>other businesses, and if you can no longer compete find another business
>to go into. Why should the same principle not apply to employees? As
>employees compete for the value they give their employer the business as
>a whole increases it's competitiveness. What better way to encourage
>learning than to have people compete with one another based on their
>knowledge and skill?
During school days (and even in the not too distant past), I used to
espouse competition as a virtue. I was one of those who was near the
"winning" end of school life and used to consider it my duty to have
better performance each time.
But the other side of the story is that I realised (much later, to my
dismay) that I was also unconciously treating the "losers" with contempt.
It had been implicitly imbibed into me not to associate with people having
"lesser" skills or aptitude. It was only when I faced a few big blows
myself that it occured to me that those "losers" were infact very
intelligent people and there was a lot to learn from them.
These days I am getting increasingly convinced that the competition model
works only for the short term and not for the long term. Infact,
competition can make people think short term and forget the long term --
often with disastrous consequences.
Let me give a brief illustration. I am from India. Over the past eight
years or so, we have been seeing more and more talk about the liberalised
and globalised economy. As a consequence, the face of most Indian cities
have changed. People sport cell phones, pagers, swanky cars, "hi tech"
gadgets..., things which were inconceivable in the last decade. On the
surface everything seems fine, even glorious-- people who could not dream
of leaving their town are now trotting around the globe. But there are
some symptoms which make us disconcerted as to what the future holds. The
roads have become increasingly clogged with vehicles and pollution levels
have long crossed the danger marks. There is a perinneal lack of basic
infrastructure like drinking water, electricity, education system and
sanitation. The number of people living below the poverty line has not
changed.. Infact, these are the *very same* problems we had before the
liberalisation. Now we have in addition to them, problems like increased
crime, noise and air pollution...
Why am I telling this is that NO MODEL BASED ON COMPETITION CAN SOLVE SUCH
PROBLEMS. How can you motivate private entrapreneurs to compete to provide
quality education? or provide drinking water?? or care for the aged??? The
reason is that the competition model relies heavily on gratification. It
is only those class of problems for which the gratification is immediate,
tangible and measurable that the competition model works. Infact, for the
larger and long term problems, what we need is cooperation.
I would rather have my employees cooperate and work as a cohesive whole
than encourage competition among themselves and create animosity. I would
not like to regard my organization as a player in a big playing field
whose main aim is to win trophies. Rather I would like to consider my
organization as a group of people who strive to implement solutions that
solve problems.
Warm Regards
Srinath
--Srinath Srinivasa <srinaths@lotus.iitm.ernet.in>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>