Competition continues to prove to the society as an ideal approach to achieving goals. In a number of occasions, it leads to increased levels of performance while the company strives towards conquering the opponents (Carnegie 34). However, competition has also been blamed for exploitation tendencies as people go to great strengths in order to best, whether in the classroom, in business or in the workplace. Competition means that there has to be a winner and this has its pros and cons. Therefore, the question that arises is, is competition beneficial to society? Clearly, while competition might cause harm to some of the participants, it spurs growth and is largely beneficial to society.
One of the benefits of competition in this case is productivity gains. While more than, one person seeks o become managers, and there is only a single spot open, competition takes course. The employees go out to work harder in trying to outshine each other. They show stay late and up early, and volunteer to undertake extra works without any complaints. When the employees battle it out to get better positions, prestige, or pay, they work harder. Employees are working harder lead to an increase in revenue and productivity. This becomes a situation of win-win for the firm. The enhancement of the bottom line becomes the integral management focus so anything helping to achieve the same is beneficial (Covey 49).
The other advantage of the competition in the workplace is employee benefits. Healthy competition brings out the potential of a person. It continues to break the absolute monotony within jobs that could have been stagnant. The pushes to success above fellow employees make others better persons. The competition includes planning and strategy, skills that one could not usually apply daily. They develop ways of bettering than other competitors that ultimately makes them better employees. Even though one ends up not securing the promotion, title, or raise they intended to, they become more well rounded than before, and it augments the resume richly (Carnegie 46). The other form of advantage is self-improvement. This is one of the ways that workplace competition becomes an advantage to the employees through spurring high levels of commitment towards self-improvement. While bonuses and financial incentives are a plus towards getting onto the competition, the individuals seeing the bigger picture take such competition as opportunities of bettering themselves while in a process of gaining a hand in the competition. Aspects of self-improvement include actions such as change of work habits into more organization, use of visualization as well as goal setting in achieving goals and performing work of a higher quality (Covey 68).
Further, there are plenty of manager benefits associated to this course. All forms of good competition require judges while within the workplace managers are ultimate judges. Managers or respective management teams decide on which person gets new title or a promotion. This appears to be one of the hard jobs and not many are attracted to it but it is a good learning experience. Managers’ impartiality in practice along with high levels of wisdom for the decisions of the victors in healthy workplace competition is final (Carnegie 87). For female managers, the management and promotion tasks for other women add much tension within workplaces. Implementing assertive management as well as being out-spoken for various decisions helps in diffusion of such tension.
Learning from competitors is another key advantage of competition. In most companies, workplaces are filled with skilled and talented individuals having diverse expertise and specialization areas. An element of friendly competition across employees helps in the promotion of atmosphere, which has conducive learning skill sets for each other’s failures and strengths for the company’s best interest. This allows for the generation of teamwork (Covey 89). While not all forms of workplace competition necessarily take place within individual levels, it can be engendering to the teamwork sense for the workplace while workers are grouped to compete with each other. It has various positive outcomes coming from workers in cooperation with each other. For instance, workers learn the impact of communication as well as helping other people while both of them spill into diverse work areas like customer service.
On the contrary, some of the negative impacts of competition in the workplace include the creation of unhealthy rivalries resulting in workers having to resent each other. It becomes especially true in case one individual or team constantly wins the competitions. Such elements result in gaps between the workforce that proves to be rather unhealthy across internal relations at the workplace. Competition also creates stress hence proving counterproductive to efforts of some workers. Some workers are not always performing well under pressure and can be more productive in work environments that allow for more easygoing approaches to doing work.
Fierce competition also amounts to an attitude of "win at all costs" and brings out the bad elements of some workers. Competition could be great on various sectors but not always in the workplace (Carnegie 86). Competition places the focus to individuals and not necessarily the teams. If people are working to their own benefit, the overall company objective may not be realized. The extensive synergy coming from having to work as creative groups loses meaning due to competition. Competition puts much stress on the people and causes early burnout that leads to individuals leaving their respective jobs instead of facing the competitive work environments.
In summary, competition causes increase in the efficiency levels among employees in a company. The competitive atmosphere triggers the employees into producing exceptional work acceptable to both the management and more importantly, impressive work to the clients. Furthermore, aspects of competition push employees into meeting deadlines and adhering to management standards while avoiding the creation of poor impressions. They enable the employees gain the necessary management trust and confidence. Most organizations embrace a collection of competitiveness and cooperation in the course of doing business. The issues dictated in such cases are the rise in the workplaces for which extreme internal competition does not have adequacy in dealing with. In case the organization plainly focuses on competition without facilitated collaboration and a sense to shared fate, the management is on a time bomb of negative competitiveness (Carnegie 23).
Works Cited
Carnegie, Dale. How To Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. Print
Covey, Stephen. R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Print
