Teetering between Cooperation and Competition: Social Comparisons and Peer Nominations

Within organizations, individuals both collaborate with peers in pursuit of common goals and compete with those same peers for rewards and promotions. Whether individuals perceive their peers in competitive or collaborative terms can fundamentally influence important organizational interactions and decisions. In this work, we document the prevalence of these labile relationships and we describe how subtle cues can shift individuals from identifying their peers as collaborators to identifying them as competitors. We demonstrate that prompting individuals to engage in a social comparison can generate envy and profoundly influence their willingness to nominate others for performance recognition. In a field experiment, we show that a social comparison cue reduces co-worker award nominations by 60%. In a laboratory study, we show that these cues reduce collaborators’ willingness to nominate one another when they are members of poorly performing groups, but that this effect is attenuated for highly effective groups. We discuss implications of these findings and highlight the importance of labile organizational identities for employee award programs and the broader managerial challenge of promoting collaboration in the workplace.