The Engagement Game by Jamie Madigan

Author:Jamie Madigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Competition and Cooperation

Throughout part of the summer of 1992, the world’s best athletes climbed the awards podiums for their respective events in the Summer Olympic Games held in Barcelona, Spain. The gold medalists were often radiant and grinning into the cameras, having proven themselves to be the best of the best. But forget them. Everyone understands why they were so happy. It was the silver and bronze medal winners that researchers from Cornell University and the University of Toledo were really curious about.22 One would expect that the higher someone finished in the Olympic ratings, the happier they should be. Gold should be happiest, silver second happiest, and bronze third happiest. But that didn’t seem to be happening. The researchers looked closely and saw that, on average, the silver medalists standing up on their podiums at the awards ceremonies were not nearly as jubilant as the third-place bronze winners. Why not?

Human psychology is complex, and there’s a lot more going on between people’s ears than you might expect during a competition. People consistently make irrational comparisons with others, they obsess over missed opportunities, they react differently depending on how comparisons are framed, and they obsess over arbitrary performance standards. To understand what happened to the silver and bronze medal winners in the 1992 Summer Olympics, we need to understand things that video game designers have figured out that get people to engage in friendly competitions and motivate them to keep trying until they’re satisfied with their performance—and how employers do the same.

Many of these psychological principles in play were born of research in social and organizational psychology. We don’t often think of our own employees challenging one another, but the fact is that they sometimes compete for opportunities, promotions, and resources. Even if they eschew head-to-head competition, employees compare their own performance against standards or their past performance. As a manager, you have a chance to frame, communicate, and present performance information that promotes friendly competition and the engagement that comes with it.

In other words, you can learn a lot from video games about how to get people to compete and work harder—and to be happy while they do it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.