Organizational Behavior: the Enemy Next Door Article Summary

The article, Organizational Behavior: The Enemy Next Door, talked about how companies like CompUSA used a high-performance work culture to get the most from their employees. The article when on to talk about how this theory may work well for awhile, and may get the most from most employees, but wears on employees and most often causes employees to turn on each other. With this type of culture at work, employees have no reason to help one another out and only look out for themselves. Another thing that CompUSA did that is along the same lines is regional managers had name tags they wore displaying shrink numbers for their stores. The reaction towards those with poor numbers was, “Look at that guy's shrink. It is terrible compared to the company average. I am not sitting next to him."

The article went on to talk about other companies implementing similar tactics that caused employees to look out for only themselves and not want to better the company. Companies that had large discrepancies between the highest and lowest paid employees usually had big problems internally. Also, companies that had large rewards for better performing employees and vice versa for low performing employees, had the same problems. The article continued with studies that showed organizations performed much better when they had a direct competitor to compete against, rather than competing internally with their own employees. When a company lost a key competitor and started competing amongst themselves, the business would begin to go downhill.

I see the information from this article being extremely relevant to many different walks of life. Within the business world, when managers are only competing to be better and higher up than their fellow managers within the same company, they are only trying to help themselves and not worrying about the company. An employee with this type of culture within their organization will never look to better anyone but themselves in hopes that they will get...