Part 2: How your company silently turns your ambition into anxiety
Inside the silent systems turning comparison into corporate currency
The business model built on workers’ insecurity
In Part 1, I wrote about how one colleague’s success sent me into a spiral of self-doubt. At the time, it felt deeply personal. But with hindsight, I’ve realised it wasn’t just about me — it was the product of a broader workplace culture.
In high-performance and cutthroat industries, comparison culture is a core feature of the business model. These workplaces institutionalise it, glamorise it and then act surprised when people burn out or turn on each other.
This piece is about how corporations turn people’s ambition into a competitive blood sport and the psychological toll it takes.
Comparison culture isn’t accidental, it’s engineered
At a structural level, it makes perfect sense for corporates to encourage comparison amongst their workers. It fuels competition. Competition drives performance. And performance drives profit.
Over time, I’ve seen three key ways this comparison culture gets embedded — subtle in theory, but ruthless in practice.
1. Forced rankings (the bell curve trap)
Comparison culture runs deep in organisations because of forced ranking systems. Employees are slotted into pre-set performance bands. It doesn’t matter if someone is excelling in absolute terms or if the entire team is performing strongly — what matters is how each person stacks up relative to everyone else. At the end of the day, the organisation demands a bell curve.
Because these rankings are tied to bonuses, promotions and sometimes even job security, the focus inevitably shifts from “what’s best for the team” to “what’s best for me.” I’ve seen firsthand how damaging this can be. Instead of supporting one another, people start calculating moves as collaboration suddenly feels risky.
2. The corporate scoreboard
The second way organisations institutionalise comparison culture is through the "corporate scoreboard". Walk into any modern workplace and you’ll find performance metrics plastered everywhere — from dashboards flashing real-time data to “Top Sales Associate of the Month” emails.
At a law firm I worked at, every Monday began with a report listing everyone’s billable hours from the previous week. Lawyers’ names were highlighted if they were below target — nothing amplifies inadequacy like seeing your name languishing mid-table before your first coffee.
These tools are marketed as motivational and transparent. In reality, they weaponise visibility. By reducing complex contributions to a simplistic numbers game, colleagues become competitors overnight. Collaboration withers as people obsess over gaming the metrics — chasing billable hours instead of work quality, prioritising visible wins over meaningful teamwork.
Worst of all, the scoreboard never resets. Real-time updates mean the pressure is relentless and the stakes feel existential. When your worth is reduced to a fluctuating digit on a public dashboard, even minor dips trigger dread: Will I be next on the layoff list? The anxiety isn’t just about keeping up. It’s about surviving in a system where your value is always relative, never absolute.
3. The pyramid problem
The third driver is the pyramid structure of most organisations. While it’s inevitable that only a few make it to the top, the psychological toll of this hierarchy is rarely discussed.
Employees compete for scarce, high-value rewards — promotions, bonuses, partnerships — where success depends on outpacing peers. Economists call this “tournament theory”: organisations dangle exponentially larger prizes (think CEOs earning 300x the median pay) which only so many people can attain. The goal is to fuel rivalry between peers as they each compete for the higher-paying positions. An example of this is investment banks’ “up or out” systems — analysts compete for limited associate roles and those who don’t make the cut are shown the door.
This silent war transforms workplaces. Collaboration becomes precarious as helping a colleague might strengthen your competition. I’ve seen people hoard information or subtly undermine others. Not because they’re toxic, but because the system makes them feel like they have to. It’s a strange paradox: you’re encouraged to be a team player, but the structure rewards individual advancement.
The real cost emerges in what this tournament breeds: chronic hierarchy anxiety. Employees internalise their worth as rank-dependent, trapped in a constant “threat state”. They adopt a transactional mindset to survive in a system where every interaction becomes a calculation: How does this advance me up the ladder? The tragedy is the selves we lose while playing a game rigged to keep us climbing.
What this culture does to us
These systems don’t just affect how we’re evaluated. Over time, they shape how we think, how we behave and who we become at work.
When being busy becomes a badge of honour
One of the strangest byproducts of comparison culture is the glorification of overwork. In many high-performance workplaces, the people who get the most praise aren’t necessarily the smartest or most thoughtful — they’re the ones who look the busiest. You know the type: the overly confident office worker who brags about staying at the office until 9 p.m. (even if two of those hours were spent at the gym in the evening).
This creates a kind of hustle pageantry — where being chronically busy becomes a status symbol. Researchers call it “performative overwork”, where looking swamped and sleep-deprived signals importance. And it’s reinforced everywhere. If someone else is online at midnight, suddenly you feel like you should be too.
I’ve always found it amusing: once upon a time, leaving early signified seniority (while junior worker bees stayed until midnight). Now, it’s the opposite. Status is measured by how late you’re seen online, how many hours you can visibly log and how exhausted you appear.
Ambition gets rewired
Comparison culture doesn’t just alter how we work. It corrupts why we work.
Ambition shifts from pursuing meaningful goals to chasing relative advantages. I’ve watched colleagues take on deals and tasks they had zero interest in, solely to outpace rivals.
Doing this over a sustained period leads to burnout and empty victories. Even when you achieve something, the satisfaction is short-lived. Rather than feeling proud, your immediate thought is: Was that enough? Did it measure up?
I’ve been guilty of this too — chasing accolades for my résumé instead of doing what actually mattered to me. It’s a miserable way to live, honestly.
Envy creeps in
In my last article, I described how a new colleague’s success stirred up something ugly in me: envy.
Turns out, that reaction is disturbingly normal in workplace-fuelled comparison cultures. When someone else is flying, you’re not just inspired — you feel threatened. You fear being left behind and looking bad by comparison.
That fear can trigger some dark impulses. Feeling secretly relieved when they stumble. Being less inclined to help others succeed. I’d love to say we’re all above this. But truthfully, I’ve seen even the most well-intentioned people fall victim to these instincts.
And it’s hard to blame them. Put enough pressure on individuals in a high-stakes, cutthroat environment and those primal instincts emerge — not because they’re malicious, but because the bell curve rewards it.
The validation trap
Perhaps the most corrosive part of comparison culture is how it hijacks our need for validation.
In a healthy environment, you measure progress by learning, growth and alignment with your values. But in comparison-fuelled office culture, success becomes performative. You chase titles, bonuses and shout-outs — because those are the visible signs of worth.
I saw it happen all the time: smart, grounded people becoming hyper-alert overachievers, desperate for a senior person’s approval as if it were oxygen. Not because they were shallow, but because in that environment, external validation was the only thing that seemed to count.
It’s a treadmill: you chase the next symbol of “winning” while never feeling secure. Eventually, you forget why you were even running in the first place, substituting fulfilment with the pursuit of praise.
Running the race on your own terms
Modern workplaces are a masterclass in subtle psychological warfare. Ambition gets warped. Envy festers beneath professional smiles. And self-worth shrinks to the size of a dashboard metric.
I didn’t grasp how much this environment had shaped me until I paused to ask:
What am I actually running towards?
And more importantly — is it worth the cost?
For many of us, the answer isn’t to drop out of the race altogether. It’s to run it differently — on terms defined by meaning, growth and intrinsic markers of success.
In Part 3, I’ll share how I started shifting my mindset — how I reframed ambition, used comparison more intentionally and rebuilt my sense of self beyond the corporate scoreboard.
Because the truth is: you can still be driven without being dragged under.
And yes.
You can still win, even if you’re not chasing first place.
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All of these systems seem to reward the organization, not the individual. I’d go further: they actively harm workers. It’s less about strategy and more about psychological warfare dressed up as ambition. You’re told to collaborate, but punished for not competing.