Cooperation and Competition

Cooperation is necessary for teams to operate smoothly and effectively, and a cooperative atmosphere offers many benefits for team members. However, many team members find themselves in mixed-motive situations that include both cooperation and competition. Team members may be competitive for cultural, personal, and organizational reasons. Cooperation can be encouraged through strategies focused on team goals, communication, and interpersonal actions. However, if teams become too cooperative then over-conformity and poor decision making can result. Competition can create negative effects on the team, even when the team is successful.

Learning Objectives

What is the impact of a mixed-motive situation? 2. Why do people act competitively in teams? 3. How are cooperators, competitors, and individualists different? 4. How does competition hurt a team? 5. How does competition between teams affect a team? 6. What are the benefits and problems of cooperation? 7. How do teams respond to competitive versus cooperative rewards? 8. How can a team deal with the negative effects of competition?

Teamwork as a Mixed-Motive Situation

The essence of teamwork is the cooperative interactions of team members. Cooperation is limited by competition, especially when goals are not shared. Team members should be working together toward a common goal, but competition makes team members work against one another when their individual goals become more important than the team goal. In a competitive relationship, the goal is to outperform others, and when this rivalry occurs among members in a team, the team is prevented from focusing on its common goals.

Being a team member should encourage people to act cooperatively, but team members often find themselves in a mixed-motive situation. Consider the following examples:

You are the member of a budget committee that must allocate funds to various departments within the organization. As a committee member, you want to do what is best for the organization, but you also want to make sure your department gets more than its fair share of funds.

As a student working on a group project, you want to do a good job so you can get a good grade. However, you have other classes and demands on your time. What you really want is to put in the least amount of effort and still get a good grade.

As a basketball player, only the team’s score determines the winner. You should be focused on coordinating your plays with the other team members. However, there is a scout in the audience, and being the game’s high scorer will get you the attention you need to be noticed.

Often, team members find themselves in these all-too-common mixed-motive situations described above. These examples are neither cooperative nor competitive situations, they are both simultaneously. They create “social dilemmas” for the participants. Each member wants to maximize his or her rewards and minimize his or her costs. Selfish behavior may be the best strategy for each individual, but if people act cooperatively then the team and everyone in it is better off.

Unfortunately, many people decide to be competitive in a mixed-motive situation. Once they start acting competitively (or putting in reduced efforts for the team),

others respond in the same way. The result is poor team performance. This is one of the reasons why students complain that the worst problem with group projects is that not everyone does his or her fair share (Wall & Nolan, 1987).

Cooperation in a mixed-motive situation is encouraged by several factors. When team members believe their contributions to the team are valuable and important, they are more likely to contribute (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). Members are more prone to act cooperatively if they believe others are likely to act in the same way (Dawes, 1988). Smaller teams tend to be more cooperative than are larger teams (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). Finally, the more members trust one another and believe that others will work for the team, the more committed they become (Parks, 1994).

Why Are People in Teams Competitive?

Even though working cooperatively on a team should prevent competition, competition may occur anyway. Team members may misperceive the situation and turn a cooperative situation into a competitive one, or may choose to act competitively even when it is in their best interests to act cooperatively. Why do people misperceive a cooperative situation and turn it into a competitive one? The explanations for this phenomenon have to do with culture, personality, and organizational rewards.

Culture

One way to view cultural differences is along an individualist-collectivist dimension (Hofstede, 1980). Individualists tend to be more competitive with their coworkers than collectivists. The United States has an individualist culture that promotes competition. Our emphasis on individualism, freedom, capitalism, and personal success all support the value of competition. Although we are not “anticooperation,” we glorify the winners in a competition. Some Americans consider it un-American to say that competition is bad.

Clearly, this cultural value affects the ways in which people respond to situations. Some Americans even have a negative attitude toward teamwork because they believe the individual is more important than the team. To them, a focus on the team means a loss of individual freedom and autonomy.

From a cultural and business perspective, the Japanese have developed a sound approach that combines cooperation and capitalism (Slem, Levi, & Young, 1995). Their collectivist culture promotes cooperation. In Japan, cooperation is highly encouraged and rewarded, and commitment and loyalty are the keys to success in Japanese corporations. At the same time, Japanese businesses have a keen competitive sense.

 They believe that they are in a competitive fight for survival with other organizations. The key to this struggle is for employees to band together to overcome external forces.

The Japanese and other collectivist cultures have developed a strong inside-outside perspective toward working in teams. It is important for them to act cooperatively with their team members, but also to act competitively with those outside of their team.