In many areas of life, we enjoy competition. Right now, there
is lots of excitement in Wimbledon. There is even more in the World Cup, where
entire nations seem to believe that they are in matches with each other – not 22
selected players, most of whom play professional football outside their home
country. The excitement extends to management practices too, where various
prizes and rewards are distributed along with pay adjustments, all as a function
of how well each employee is thought to perform compared with others. “Competition
cures laziness,” is the belief.
What could possibly go wrong? The answer is found in a paper by Henning Piezunka, Wonjae Lee, Richard Haynes, and Matthew Bothner in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They look at Formula 1 racing, which
is a place where one can find drivers who enjoy competing and are used to
competing. After all, who would drive a car at such crazy speeds very close to
other cars if they didn’t think competition was a great thing to do? But even
in Formula 1, there are costs to competing.
The cost is a simple and important one: close competitors collide
more often. In F1 driving, colliding is never a good thing: minor collisions damage
the cars and slow them down, intermediate ones make cars useless, major ones kill
drivers. Yet collisions occur, and it turns out that they happen more often between
drivers with similar accomplishments during the season. That’s interesting
because it means that the most perilous situation is when two people are near each
other in two ways – similar social status, and capable of giving each other
trouble.
But wait, it gets worse. The intensified competition is seen
even more clearly if the drivers are also similar in other ways. Similar-age
drivers collide especially often if they have similar status. The same is true when the
stakes are high, such as when the drivers are high in the tournament ranks and
the season end is drawing near. These conditions sound a lot like those facing
employees in firms that motivate by tournament.
This gives a good account of when we can expect F1 drivers
to collide, but it also means more. Many of the modern ideas of management and
motivation rely on the idea that tournaments are good and should be encouraged
through various rewards and prizes. They don’t take into account the conflict
that results. If they did, would these practices still be as popular as they
are now?
