No Contest (42 page)

The unwillingness to acknowledge this is, I am convinced, the chief obstacle to freeing ourselves from the quicksand. People proudly tell me stories of someone they know who didn't care whether he lost, or of some competitive game in which participants were exhorted not to place too much importance on the outcome. These are steps in the right direction, and I am pleased to hear about them. But they do nothing to challenge the underlying structure of mutually exclusive goal attainment, which is the ultimate cause of the problems detailed in the preceding pages. This is often difficult to grasp in a culture that can imagine change only at the level of individual attitudes and behaviors. If next week we Americans suddenly began to recognize the destructive consequences of competition, books would start to appear in the stores with titles like “Ten Steps to a Less Competitive You.”

That competition itself may be the problem is rarely considered, least of all in the context of what goes on in the workplace.
¹¹
Nevertheless, research over the last few years continues to remind us of the importance of structural factors. In one study, people led to expect that they were going to be working cooperatively with strangers responded empathically when those strangers received a reward or punishment. But those who thought they would be competing against the others responded
counterempathically
—that is, smiling at their discomfort and grimacing at their good fortune.
¹²
Another study showed how people put into a situation of team competition tended to reject friendly overtures from people on the other side and came to view the members of that group as an undifferentiated They.
¹³

In chapter 7, I argued that cheating and other problems result at least as much from competition itself as from the moral failings of the individual. Several recent comments by people in different fields illustrate the naivete of condemning ugly behavior while taking no steps to challenge the basic win/lose framework.

•    In sports, a safety for the New York Giants points out that he and other football players are

 

expected and required to be good sportsmen when we are engaged in an endeavor that is hostile and aggressive . . . to go from being gentlemanly and following the rules of society to people who play violently and aggressively for two or three hours on Sunday. . . . It's not easy to do, especially when people across the line of scrimmage are literally the enemy.
¹⁴

 

•    In politics, a campaign consultant shrugs off the widespread indignation at negative advertisements, observing that

 

a political campaign, like a trial in a court of law, has but one objective—to win. Staying within the confines of the truth, a candidate or consultant will use every available legal means to attain that objective. If you don't play by the rules of the game, your opposition will.
¹⁵

 

•    In business, the director of an organization called the Ethics Resource Center says we are kidding ourselves if we think the corporate world is going to be changed by putting business students through ethics courses:

 

As long as you have a business culture that puts people in impossible situations—“your division has to grow 7 percent in the next year or else we're going to be No. a in the field and if we are, you're going to be job-hunting”—you're going to have people shipping inferior goods, juggling the books, bribing when they have to, trampling workers beneath them and generally conducting themselves in the time-honored tradition: Results, and only results, count.
¹⁶

 

•    In education, seventy-three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were disciplined for “cheating,” mostly for working in small groups to write computer programs together for fear of being unable to keep up with the class otherwise. “Many feel that the required work is clearly impossible to do by straightforward [i.e., solitary] means,” according to the faculty member who chairs MIT's Committee on Discipline.
¹⁷

Each of these examples invites us to shift our gaze from maladjusted individuals to a maladaptive system. The problem is that it is easy to suspend an athlete whose aggression slips over the edge of “acceptability,” to condemn the creators of nasty political ads, to jail greedy Wall Street lawbreakers, or to punish students who work collaboratively. It is not so easy to undertake social change of the sort that must follow an admission that something is wrong with competition per se.

 

The growing clamor to make hospitals, schools, industries, and now even government more “competitive” raises once again the question of whether this goal has anything to do with reaching excellence, or whether we have simply blurred the two ideas, overlooking what should be an obvious fact—that beating others and doing quality work are two completely different concepts. Whether the first
leads
to the second is a legitimate question, but the answer, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that it almost always does not. The trouble with our schools, for example, is that they are much
too
competitive, which helps to explain why so little learning is taking place.
¹⁸

A similar dynamic is now at work in the field of health care, where many institutions are being pressured for the first time to become “competitive.” More hospitals and clinics are being run by for-profit corporations; many institutions, forced to battle for “customers,” seem to value a skilled director of marketing more highly than a skilled caregiver. As in any other economic sector, the race for profits translates into pressure to reduce costs, and the easiest way to do it here is to cut back on services to unprofitable patients, that is, those who are more sick than rich.

This is exactly what insurance companies are doing under the banner of “competitiveness”: denying coverage to those who need it most. In many cases, there is not even any greater efficiency to show for the greater inequity. “Among providers, competition has led to a stunning round of spending on facilities and equipment in an attempt to lure patients from other providers—and never mind if the new facilities are [unnecessary].”
¹⁹
The result: hospital costs are actually
higher
in areas where there is more competition for patients.
²⁰

There are few pockets of the U.S. economy in which competition between firms is introduced for the first time. When people talk about increasing the competition in a given sector, they often mean abandoning government regulation in order to more nearly approximate a laissez-faire or “pure” market. Recent developments of this kind, such as in the airline industry, serve only to increase one's skepticism about the value of competition.
²¹

But the data with which I am more familiar concern the effects of competition within a given workplace. Add to the research cited in chapter 3 a bushel of new studies that Dean Tjosvold of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia conducted at utility companies, manufacturing plants, engineering firms, and many other kinds of organizations. Over and over again, Tjosvold has found that “cooperation makes a work force motivated,” whereas “serious competition undermines coordination.”
²²
(Interestingly, one study from Georgia State University discovered that competition reduces the quality of one's performance, even if one happens to be a rhesus monkey!)
²³

Meanwhile, the management guru celebrated from Detroit to Tokyo, W. Edwards Deming, has declared that the practice of having employees compete against each other is

 

unfair [and] destructive. We cannot afford this nonsense any longer. . . . [We need to] work together on common problems [, but] annual rating of performance, incentive pay, [or] bonuses cannot live with teamwork. . . . What takes the joy out of learning . . . [or out of] anything? Trying to be number one.
²⁴

 

What
does
lead to excellence, then? This depends on what field and task we are talking about, but generally we find that people do terrific work when (1) they are inspired, challenged, and excited by what they are doing, and (2) they receive social support and are able to exchange ideas and collaborate effectively with others.
^*
The data show that competition makes both less likely.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union has led a lot of Americans to construct the following syllogism: since (a) our economic system is based on competition, (b) their system collapsed, and (c) we were rivals, this must mean that (d) competition works. It would take considerably more space than I have been allotted here to offer a serious challenge to this rather dubious bit of deduction. Suffice it to say that the very adversarial nature of the relationship between the two countries—competition writ large, in other words—has had a great deal to do with trouble experienced on both sides of the old iron curtain. Of course, many factors played a part in sinking communism, but if we are looking for a simple explanation, we would do well to focus not on the absence of competition but on the absence of the Soviet citizen's commitment to his or her work, chiefly due to the lack of personal autonomy and genuine democracy in that country. Then we might consider that the very same factors are present in this country.
^25
†

Another unsettling event, although it is already fading from our memories, was the stock market crash of October 1987. Many analysts attributed that event to the “failure of international cooperation”—specifically, a struggle involving German interest rates and U.S. currency, and ultimately affecting the economic condition of many countries.
²⁶
The nations of the world seem to become more interdependent with each passing week; in the face of this fact, competition seems a mutually ruinous proposition. This is why it is dismaying that so few voices are raised against such competition,
²⁷
leaving U.S. politicians across the ideological spectrum to assume that the only question is
how
we can beat the Japanese (the enemy
du jour),
as opposed to whether triumph is preferable to cooperation—or even possible in any meaningful sense.

The lessons to be drawn from what happened to the USSR, why the market crashed, and how the United States should deal with other nations are, for the most part, matters for argument and speculation. But hard research continues to accumulate on specific questions related to the effects of small-scale competition.

I cited a 1982 study, for instance, in which children who were competing to make the best collage did less creative work than those who were not in a contest (
[>]
). Five years later, the same researcher described how she found the identical effect with adults, including corporate executives and managers, who were working on the kind of problems used to measure creativity: those who were competing to devise better solutions than anyone else were less likely to solve them correctly than were those who did not compete at all.
²⁸

I also described a 1981 study in which participating in a contest made adults less interested in the task on which they had been working (p. 60). Five years later,
this
finding was replicated with children: fifth- and sixth-graders were less likely to continue playing a balancing game if they had been competing earlier to keep themselves balanced longer than others.
²⁹
Moreover, a book from two of the country's leading theorists of human motivation concluded that, compared to other ways of rewarding people, competition is the “most controlling (and thus most undermining of intrinsic motivation).”
³⁰

 

Speaking of balancing acts, I am reminded of the difficulty of persuading some people to question the value of competition once it dawns on them that the logical conclusion of this process may affect their tennis game. Since I am not on a nationwide crusade for the abolition of tennis—the race to win in the classroom, the workplace, and the home being far more destructive, as I see it—I have faced the very practical question of how to handle the inexplicably powerful attachment many Americans have formed to the idea that recreation must be structured so as to produce winners and losers. I have addressed groups of educators or managers who express a willingness to consider transforming what they do on the job every day but whose faces darken when I hint that competition does not suddenly become benign if it takes place on the weekend.

Some people respond by insisting that they play for fun and don't really care who wins. I have not met many people for whom this is actually true—people who walk away from a victory and from a loss with exactly the same emotional state. But let us assume it happens. This delightful nonchalance about results offers an opportunity to take one small step away from the playing-field-as-battlefield model by resolving not to keep score. This suggestion, however, furrows brows. No score? The game will become boring! And so it may. But what have we here if not a powerful indictment of an activity so intrinsically tedious that we manage to stick with it only by relying on the artifice of quantifying our triumph over someone else?

If it is performance we seek—and I must confess to the heretical opinion that our lives would not be miserably impoverished in the absence of new records being set at the Olympics—then let us listen to what consulting sports psychologists tell their clients. Stop thinking about winning! these experts counsel: focus on the quality of your own performance.

At least one study has found that people are more likely to drop out of sports if they are motivated by victory rather than mastery.
³¹
Moreover, a survey of more than 1,200 teenage athletes discovered that of all the factors thought to promote enjoyment of sports, winning “had the weakest relationship with Sport Enjoyment . . . and was not significantly predictive for the total sample, either gender, or any of the age groups.”
³²
And from yet another source we hear this: “When there is less focus on winning or losing and more focus on playing well in a competitive situation, there will be less detrimental effects of competition on intrinsic motivation.”
³³
This, however, is not just a sly tip to help athletes win. It is a fact that raises questions about the value of competing at all, in sports or anywhere else. It is further confirmation that doing well and beating others are, structurally as well as intentionally, altogether different enterprises.