You may be familiar with stories (even from your own experience) of employees who choose to denigrate
Question:
You may be familiar with stories (even from your own experience) of employees who choose to denigrate or subtly sabotage their fellow employees rather than focusing on how they themselves can be better or more productive. Often, a company may notice not that a single employee behaves this way, but that many, most, or all of them do. It seems obvious that spending time and energy figuring out how to make other employees appear worse, instead of spending that time and energy to make yourself better, is harmful to the company, but the behavior continues to be seen among large groups of workers. How might game theory offer an explanation for this behavior?
Select one:
a. The behavior is a result of a prisoners' dilemma. An employee finds that his own position is improved if a fellow employee appears worse, regardless of whether the fellow employee engages in that sabotaging behavior or not. While it is best for everyone (and the company) overall to not have any of that behavior occur, the result is that it will happen frequently because it is in each employee's individual best interest to sabotage.
b. An employee will engage in sabotaging behavior because doing so is a one-shot game. The employee knows that it will only take a single instance of a fellow employee appearing to be negligent to get that fellow employee fired, so the sabotaging employee will remain hired but with fewer fellow employees with which to compete.
c. The sabotaging behavior is a dominated strategy that always harms the company and the employees. Since it continues to occur, though, then employees have failed to eliminate it as a strategy, and since it hasn't been eliminated, it becomes the most likely outcome.
d. The sabotaging behavior is the result of a sequential game, where the employees attempt to be the "first mover" and be the first to sabotage their fellow employees. If a fellow employee is the first one to appear worse to the managers (and I am thus the first one to appear better to the managers), then if I am a later victim of sabotage by my fellow employee, the manager won't think as badly of me since it happened later in time.
Strategic Management Text and Cases
ISBN: 978-1259196553
7th edition
Authors: Gregory Dess, Tom Lumpkin, Alan Eisner, Gerry McNamara