Passion Struck Podcast · With John R. Miles

Why Workplace Competition Is Destroying Collaboration | Dr. Nir Halevy

October 20, 2026

Workplace competition shapes far more than how we perform, pursue promotions, or measure professional success. It influences whether we trust our colleagues, share what we know, celebrate someone else’s achievements, and believe that our own contributions matter. When workplace competition becomes the organizing principle of an entire culture, the same people who need to collaborate to succeed can begin to see one another as obstacles to advancement.

In this episode of Passion Struck, I sit down with Dr. Nir Halevy, a Stanford professor of organizational behavior and author of Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them, to examine how social comparison, forced ranking systems, and poorly designed hierarchies shape the way people behave at work. Our conversation explores why hierarchy can provide useful structure and direction, how it can also create unhealthy rivalry and injustice, and what leaders can do to build organizations where people have room to succeed together.

Why Workplace Competition Becomes a Problem When Success Feels Zero-Sum

Competition is woven into human relationships long before we enter the workplace. Children compare themselves with classmates and siblings, athletes measure their performances against teammates, and adults evaluate their progress against colleagues who appear to be moving ahead. As Nir explains, people have an innate desire to understand where they stand relative to others. Social comparison gives us information about our abilities, our progress, and our place within a group, but the meaning we assign to those comparisons can profoundly influence how we experience success.

The problem emerges when an individual’s advancement begins to feel inseparable from someone else’s loss. In a workplace where recognition, promotions, compensation, and influence are treated as scarce rewards, colleagues can start interpreting one another’s achievements as threats. A talented coworker’s success may trigger self-doubt, while sharing knowledge with a teammate may feel like giving away a competitive advantage. Over time, these small interpretations shape behavior, encouraging people to protect information, limit cooperation, and invest more energy in distinguishing themselves than in strengthening the team.

Nir’s research invites us to examine the conditions that make competition constructive or destructive. A healthy environment can encourage people to learn from one another, pursue mastery, and improve the quality of their work. A poorly designed one can turn ordinary differences in performance into judgments about personal worth. The distinction matters because organizations depend on both individual contribution and collective effort. When people feel that they must choose between helping a colleague and protecting their own future, the system has created a conflict that can undermine the very performance it was intended to improve.

How Forced Ranking Systems Turn Colleagues Into Competitors

Forced ranking systems are designed to differentiate employees according to their performance, often by placing them into predetermined categories. In some organizations, these rankings influence promotions and long-term career opportunities. In others, a low ranking can threaten someone’s immediate job security. The logic is familiar: make differences visible, reward the strongest performers, and create incentives for everyone to improve. Yet the effects depend heavily on how the system distributes opportunity, how employees understand the consequences, and whether they believe their success is genuinely within their control.

During our conversation, I shared my own experiences with forced ranking, from the Naval Academy to consulting and corporate leadership. At the Naval Academy, class rankings could influence the timing of future promotions. In my later corporate experience, ranking systems carried different consequences, including situations where employees near the bottom faced a significant risk of losing their jobs. These experiences illustrate how a seemingly administrative process can shape the emotional climate of an organization. When rankings influence a person’s future so directly, colleagues can become competitors even when their daily responsibilities require them to cooperate.

Nir makes an important distinction between competition that motivates people to improve their work and competition that encourages harmful behavior. The damage can begin quietly. An employee may withhold advice that would help a colleague deliver a stronger presentation, keep useful information to themselves, or avoid investing time in someone else’s development. More active forms of sabotage can follow, including spreading misleading information or undermining another person’s work. Each decision may appear small in isolation, but together they can erode trust and weaken the relationships that make coordinated performance possible.

This is why leaders need to look beyond whether a ranking system produces measurable differences in output. They also need to examine what employees are learning about one another, what kinds of behavior the system rewards, and whether people still have reasons to help each other succeed. A performance management system should support meaningful contribution and development. When it makes cooperation feel dangerous, the organization may be paying a substantial relational cost for a narrow definition of performance.

In this episode, you’ll learn

Why workplace competition can shift from healthy motivation to rivalry that weakens trust and collaboration.
How forced ranking systems can encourage information hoarding, withholding help, and other harmful workplace behaviors.
The three signs of a broken hierarchy: excessive competition, injustice, and instability.
How dominance and prestige create different pathways to leadership influence and employee trust.
What research from healthcare settings reveals about supportive supervision, kindness, and workplace well-being.
How improv teams demonstrate the value of relatedness, mutual support, and making room for others to succeed.

The Three Signs of a Broken Workplace Hierarchy

Hierarchy can help organizations coordinate expectations, clarify responsibilities, and establish pathways for growth. It can also give employees access to mentorship and help people understand how their work contributes to a larger purpose. Nir’s work distinguishes between hierarchies that serve these functions and those that create patterns of excessive competition, injustice, and instability. These three warning signs offer leaders a practical way to assess whether their organizational structure is supporting people or gradually undermining them.

Excessive competition

Competition becomes excessive when employees are continually encouraged to compare themselves with their peers and pursue advancement at one another’s expense. Rather than treating colleagues as sources of knowledge and support, people begin to see them as rivals whose success may reduce their own opportunities. The organization can still appear ambitious and productive on the surface, while employees become increasingly reluctant to share information, offer help, or acknowledge another person’s strengths. Over time, the loss of cooperation can weaken the team’s ability to solve problems that no individual can address alone.

Injustice and unequal opportunity

A hierarchy becomes unjust when access to opportunity, influence, and recognition is distributed in ways people perceive as unfair. Employees lower in the structure may feel unheard, overlooked, or unable to influence decisions that directly affect their work. Meanwhile, those with greater status may receive more support, flexibility, or opportunities to demonstrate their abilities. Such differences matter because people pay attention to how an organization treats them and others. Their emotional responses, including frustration, fear, gratitude, and pride, can reveal whether the structure is creating a sense of contribution or reinforcing a sense of exclusion.

Instability and uncertainty

Instability develops when people cannot predict how changes in status, leadership, or organizational priorities will affect their future. When advancement appears arbitrary or a colleague’s rise seems to require someone else’s decline, employees have reason to monitor shifting relationships and protect their positions. This uncertainty can consume attention that would otherwise go toward learning, collaboration, and meaningful work. Leaders should pay attention to patterns of turnover, changing morale, and the emotions employees express in everyday interactions. These signals can help reveal whether a hierarchy provides enough stability for people to do their best work.

Together, these three signs encourage a more complete understanding of organizational health. The question is not simply whether a hierarchy exists, but whether its structure creates the conditions for people to contribute, develop, and maintain productive relationships.

Dominance vs. Prestige: Two Different Ways to Lead

Leadership often comes with the authority to allocate resources, make decisions, and influence other people’s opportunities. How leaders use that authority shapes the culture around them. Nir’s research draws attention to the distinction between dominance and prestige as different routes to influence. Dominance relies on power, control, or the capacity to impose costs on others. Prestige develops when people respect someone’s knowledge, abilities, experience, or contributions and choose to learn from that person.

Both can influence behavior, but they create different relational conditions. A dominance-oriented leader may secure compliance because employees fear the consequences of disagreement or failure. A prestige-oriented leader earns influence by demonstrating competence and giving others reasons to trust their judgment. In the first environment, people may become preoccupied with avoiding mistakes and protecting themselves. In the second, they have more room to learn, seek guidance, and develop their own capabilities.

This distinction also helps explain why formal authority alone is an incomplete measure of leadership. A person can hold a senior position while failing to create confidence or respect among colleagues. Another person can have less formal power yet exert considerable influence because others value their judgment and experience. Healthy organizations recognize that leadership involves more than controlling outcomes. It also involves creating conditions in which people can contribute, develop, and exercise their own judgment.

Leaders can strengthen this culture through everyday choices: listening carefully, acknowledging contributions, offering useful feedback, and showing empathy when people face difficult circumstances. Nir discusses research in healthcare settings suggesting that kindness and supportive supervision can be cultivated, including findings involving nurses and supervisors. These examples offer a useful reminder that organizational culture is shaped by behaviors people can practice and reinforce, not merely by values displayed in a mission statement.

Level Up: Rethinking Hierarchy So People Can Succeed Together

When Nir and I discuss his book, Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them, the conversation returns to a question that sits beneath many organizational problems: what is a hierarchy supposed to accomplish? It is easy to treat hierarchy as a fixed feature of professional life, something employees must learn to navigate, and leaders must learn to manage. Nir’s work invites a more deliberate approach by asking whether the structures we have inherited are actually helping people and organizations thrive.

The distinction becomes clearer when we consider how people experience advancement. A hierarchy can give employees direction, provide access to mentors, and make responsibilities easier to coordinate. It can also concentrate opportunities among a small group, encourage constant status comparisons, and leave others feeling that their contributions have little influence. The structure itself is only part of the story. Its effects depend on the incentives it creates, the fairness of its decisions, and the relationships it encourages people to build.

What I find compelling about Nir’s approach is that it brings organizational design back to the everyday experience of being part of a team. The consequences of a broken hierarchy may appear in formal rankings or promotion policies, but they also show up in ordinary moments: the colleague who keeps valuable information to themselves, the employee who hesitates to ask for help, or the manager whose team has learned to interpret every success as a competition for limited recognition. These behaviors are connected to the environment in which people work, and leaders have a role in shaping that environment.

The book offers a framework for examining these systems with greater care. By identifying excessive competition, injustice, and instability, leaders can begin to understand where a hierarchy is failing and what changes might improve the experience of the people within it. That work may involve removing policies that create more harm than value, creating fairer pathways to recognition, or encouraging leadership practices rooted in empathy and respect. The larger goal is to build organizations in which people can pursue meaningful achievement while remaining invested in the success of others.

For me, this conversation connects directly to the question of mattering. People want to know that their work has an impact, that their contributions are recognized, and that they belong to something worth contributing to. A healthy hierarchy can help create those conditions. The most useful question for any leader may therefore be the one Nir leaves us with: does your hierarchy bring people closer together or pull them apart?

What Healthy Teams Can Learn From Improv About Collaboration

One of the most revealing examples in our conversation comes from improvisational theater. In discussing the improv ensemble UpStaged, Nir and I explore a simple principle: performers should be kind to themselves and others and make their partners look good. The idea captures an important feature of collaboration. Each performer contributes something of their own, but the quality of the result depends on how well they support the people sharing the stage with them.

Organizations face a similar challenge. Employees need opportunities to demonstrate individual ability, receive recognition, and advance in their careers, yet their work often depends on the knowledge and effort of others. When the culture encourages people to protect their status at every turn, cooperation becomes harder to sustain. When people understand that helping a colleague can strengthen the entire group, collaboration becomes part of how success is achieved rather than a distraction from it.

Nir’s discussion of relatedness brings the human consequences of this idea into focus. Relationships require sustained attention and investment. Trust grows through repeated experiences of fairness, generosity, and mutual respect, especially when people face competing demands or difficult decisions. Leaders can support these conditions by making expectations clearer, recognizing different forms of contribution, and creating opportunities for people with different strengths to learn from one another.

The improv example also offers a useful way to think about mattering at work. People need to know that their efforts have value and that they can make a meaningful contribution. A culture that recognizes only a narrow definition of success leaves many employees with few ways to demonstrate their strengths. A healthier hierarchy creates multiple pathways for people to contribute, develop, and earn respect. The result is an environment where individual excellence and collective achievement can reinforce one another.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

What is workplace competition, and when does it become unhealthy?

Workplace competition occurs when employees compare their performance, recognition, status, or opportunities with those of their colleagues. It can encourage improvement when people use comparison to learn and develop their abilities. It becomes unhealthy when employees believe that another person’s success threatens their own prospects, leading them to withhold information, avoid helping teammates, or undermine colleagues. The effects depend on the incentives and relationships created by the organization’s culture.

Why can forced ranking systems hurt employee engagement?

Forced ranking systems assign employees relative positions or categories, sometimes with significant consequences for compensation, promotion, or continued employment. When the system makes employees feel that only a limited number of people can succeed, it can encourage rivalry and discourage cooperation. Nir Halevy explains that these systems may motivate individual improvement, but they can also create conditions in which people hoard information, withhold assistance, or engage in sabotage. Leaders need to consider the effect on trust and team performance alongside individual results.

What are the three signs of a broken workplace hierarchy?

The three signs discussed in Nir Halevy’s work are excessive competition, injustice, and instability. Excessive competition encourages employees to pursue success at one another’s expense. Injustice emerges when people experience unequal access to opportunities, recognition, or influence. Instability arises when employees cannot predict how changes in status or organizational decisions will affect their future. Together, these patterns can weaken trust, increase frustration, and make collaboration more difficult.

What is the difference between dominance and prestige in leadership?

Dominance is a form of influence grounded in power, control, or the ability to impose consequences. Prestige is influence earned through valued abilities, knowledge, experience, or contributions that others respect. Dominance can produce compliance, while prestige can encourage people to seek guidance and learn from a leader. Understanding the distinction helps organizations consider not only who holds authority, but also how leaders earn trust and shape the behavior of their teams.

How can leaders create a more collaborative workplace?

Leaders can strengthen collaboration by establishing fair expectations, recognizing different forms of contribution, encouraging knowledge sharing, and reducing incentives that turn colleagues into rivals. They can also model empathy, offer constructive feedback, and create opportunities for employees to learn from one another. The goal is to make cooperation compatible with individual achievement, so employees have reasons to help their colleagues while continuing to develop their own capabilities.

Can workplace hierarchies be effective without creating unhealthy competition?

Yes. Hierarchies can provide structure, clarify responsibilities, coordinate expectations, and create opportunities for mentorship and development. Their effects depend on how authority and opportunity are distributed and how success is defined. A healthier hierarchy supports meaningful contribution, treats people fairly, and allows employees to demonstrate value in different ways. As Nir’s work suggests, the objective is to design organizational structures that bring people closer together and help teams succeed collectively.

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Why Workplace Competition Is Destroying Collaboration | Dr. Nir Halevy

Why Workplace Competition Becomes a Problem When Success Feels Zero-Sum

How Forced Ranking Systems Turn Colleagues Into Competitors

In this episode, you’ll learn