YOU are the weakest link, goodbye. How many times have you wished you could say that to a smart alec colleague?
Working at a large company can have much in common with the popular BBC TV game show The Weakest Link.
In the show, nine contestants answer nine rounds of questions. In each round money can be won and placed in a communal prize pool. After each round, participants vote out the person who they think is not contributing to the prize pool. The person who receives the most votes (the weakest link) is eliminated. When just two players remain, they compete against each other and the winner takes all.
Hierarchical organisations that use peer evaluations to hire, reward, or promote employees, create decision dilemmas similar to those experienced on the show. To increase group performance, which in turn determines individual outcomes, one’s peers need to be better than oneself. But to increase the probability of getting ahead, one’s peers need to be worse than oneself.
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Analysis of the behaviour of 495 competitors in 55 episodes of The Weakest Link shows that where this dilemma is stark and involves high stakes individuals make judgments that could potentially eliminate others who are substantially better or substantially worse performers than themselves. The players are least likely to vote out others whose performance is similar to their own. Individuals resolve the producer-competitor dilemma by attempting to eliminate those whose performance is very different to their own.
This has implications for the current trend of using peer evaluations — such as 360- degree reviews — at work. It has been assumed that peer performance evaluations are a good monitor of performance, however, evidence from The Weakest Link suggests that workers are likely to resolve the producer-competitor conflict by electing to work with colleagues who are similar in terms of competence.
This is a summary of a paper, Do We Prefer Coworkers Who are Better or Worse Than Us? Evidence from The Weakest Link game, by Madan Pillutla and Sarah Ronson from the London Business School. It will be presented at the Academy of Management’s conference in August. www.aomonline.org