Competition & TQM
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Competition is an integral part of daily life in the United States--indeed, it is so commonplace that most of us do not consider how pervasive competition has become. Small children compete for their parents' attention, and, in some cases, even their love. Schoolchildren compete for the best grades, or the best performance in sports. High school students compete for the best SAT scores and college students for the best scores for graduate school. Student athletes compete to play on the best teams, and ideally learn how to be gracious both in victory and defeat. In the workplace, employees vie for top salesman, or best performer, or employee of the month. Companies compete for the highest short-term revenue, or even the most employees. The entertainment industry is rife with awards for the best actor, best make-up artist, best song, and so forth. As Americans, we are taught that competition is good, that it provides an "edge," that it leads to increased productivity and performance. According to Alfie Kohn, these perceptions are incorrect. According to Kohn, competition causes severe psychological damage, leads to less than optimum productivity, and is inefficient. This research considers Kohn's ideas as presented in No Contest: The Case Against Competition, and considers the implications for total quality management.Kohn suggests nothing less than the seemingly counter intuitive argument that competition is bad. He
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eeping score, in part because sports and games so often require scorekeeping. Here again, Kohn argues that athletes perform best when measured only against their own times, not against others, and that they are less likely to take risks when in a competitive environment. Kohn also maintains that noncompetitive recreation is more effective at providing the social and psychological benefits that we associate with such activity, and that such noncompetitive activities avoid the paradoxes that we otherwise encounter when competing (Kohn, 1992).
These paradoxes result from the mixed messages that we encounter in a competitive environment. On the one hand, we encourage competition and reward "winners"; on the other hand, we punish those who win at any cost, or who are caught cheating. We reward winners, but we do not want our winners to be overly conceited or too sure of themselves. At the same time, we use the term "loser" as a severe pejorative even though most of us are losers in that there can be far fewer winners than losers in most situations. We expect our losers to be gracious even when they have suffered a crushing defeat on national television, a defeat that can be difficult for them to bear on a personal level.
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Approximate Word count = 1941
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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