Intense competition at work is driving managers to sabotage talented employees: Harvard study

'The manager is supposed to act in the best interests of the firm, but personal interests can take precedence,' Harvard researcher Hashim Zaman said. (Representational image: Unsplash)

In competitive work environments where employees are pitted against each other, colleagues are likely to sabotage each other's performance to grab a promotion or a bonus, recent research has found. It also noted that the intensity of competition can get so strong that not only peers, but even supervisors may deliberately damage the prospects of talented subordinates to secure their position and prevent future competition, Forbes India reported.

The survey-based study conducted by Hashim Zaman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Sciences at Harvard, and Karim Lakhani, a professor of business administration at Harvard found that this top-down sabotage is surprisingly common.

The researchers surveyed 335 executives and found that about 30 percent of them had witnessed sabotage in their organisations. Of them, 71 percent observed top-down sabotage while 5 percent admitted to sabotaging their direct reports.

"The manager is supposed to act in the best interests of the firm, but personal interests can take precedence," Zaman told Forbes India. "Typically, sabotage is directed toward more capable colleagues. In a hierarchical organisation, your manager may see you as a future peer, a competitor for further promotions, or even a replacement risk, so they have an incentive to use their authority to mitigate your growth ahead of time."

This not only limits the careers of talented employees, but can also hurt organisational culture and damage corporate performance, he added.

About 28 percent of the 335 executives claimed they were victims of top-down sabotage in their organisations.

When asked what drove managers to sabotage their subordinates' prospects, about 3 percent of respondents said it was due to money concerns while about 21 percent said it was because they were afraid of losing their status. About 24 percent said both status and money concerns drove managers to harm employees. Only 5 percent of the executives ever felt guilty of sabotage, the research found.