Recent reporting highlights how friendly internal competition can quickly blur into personal conflict, creating cultural strain. But while many organizations treat this as a “personality clash” or a toxic employee issue, the reality is often structural. Unhealthy internal competition is a leadership design issue—driven by unclear incentives, opaque advancement criteria, and performance pressure.
Fineas Tatar, leadership expert and co-founder of Viva, says that when rivalry flourishes, it’s rarely about the employees’ egos—it’s a symptom of an overstretched executive team.
“Corrosive rivalry happens when leaders lack the capacity to design clear, collaborative goals,” says Tatar. “When executives are drowning in small tasks, they don’t have the bandwidth to untangle complex team dynamics. Instead, they default to lazy management: rewarding visibility, speed, and output over actual collective problem-solving.”
Tatar notes that when leaders are too bogged down to intentionally manage culture, it hurts the organization in three key ways:
- Unclear incentives breed paranoia: When leaders don’t have the time to define what collective success looks like, advancement criteria become opaque. Employees stop building on each other’s efforts and begin tracking success strictly as individuals.
- Production pressure turns peers into threats: Passive or overloaded leaders often demand “more” and “faster” without setting strategic priorities. In a high-pressure environment without clear lanes, employees naturally start competing for the same scarce recognition.
- The “visibility trap” alienates top talent: When managers are strapped for time, they unconsciously reward the loudest person in the room or the one who stays the latest. This forces employees to spend their energy managing their internal PR rather than advancing actual business outcomes.
Rather than just telling employees to “play nice” or “be team players,” Tatar argues that organizations need to look at the operational friction at the top. He recommends leaders take three immediate steps to shift the culture:
- Define shared, not individual, outcomes: Move away from cascading individual targets that pit peers against each other. Instead, establish joint goals where the team is mutually accountable, forcing collaboration over competition.
- Standardize visibility and reporting: Unhealthy rivalry thrives in operational chaos. By creating clear, standardized processes for project updates and feedback, leaders remove the need for employees to “showboat” or fight for unstructured face time.
- Reclaim executive bandwidth: Leaders cannot spot, mediate, or fix toxic team dynamics if they are constantly buried in scheduling and low-leverage admin. Aggressively delegating operational friction is essential to being an active, observant leader.
“You can’t expect a leader to proactively manage team alignment and defuse toxic competition if they are spending half their week managing their own administrative chaos,” Tatar adds. “Giving executives the operational infrastructure and support they need is what actually gives them the capacity to design healthy, high-performing cultures.”