Competitiveness and combativeness can work against persuasion, collaboration, and trust-building - key for both project and change work
I met someone recently who made me think about the difference between competitiveness and collaboration.
This person was clearly intelligent, but their instinctive way of relating to people felt unusually combative. They spoke about suppliers with open contempt, framed interactions in terms of who was competent and who was failing, and seemed most comfortable when positioning themselves above others rather than alongside them.
It reminded me that some people approach work primarily as a collaborative effort, while others experience it as a constant status contest.
Winning against others rather than winning them over seemed to me, to be this person’s main approach.
That approach is not universally wrong. There are environments where a competitive orientation can be highly effective:
litigation, disputes, and regulatory enforcement
competitive bidding, tenders, and procurement exercises where only one side can ultimately prevail
sales environments built around league tables, rankings, and individual performance incentives
turnaround situations requiring difficult decisions, cost reduction, or the removal of persistent underperformance
elite sport, trading, or other winner-takes-most environments
high-stakes commercial negotiations where parties are pursuing materially different outcomes
crisis situations where rapid command decisions matter more than consensus-building
In these contexts, assertiveness, resilience, competitive drive, and a willingness to tolerate conflict can be genuine strengths.
However, most modern project and change environments are not this. They depend on sustained cooperation between people who often do not report to one another, cannot be compelled to agree, and must continue working together long after today's disagreement is resolved. Success depends less on defeating opponents and more on creating alignment across competing interests.
That is a very different psychological game.
Competitiveness and combativeness can work against persuasion, collaboration, and trust-building - key for both project and change work - and is strongly supported by organisational psychology literature. A psychological orientation towards status, control, and self-protection may overpower the collaborative instincts that good project management usually requires.
A few different bodies of literature speak to this.
I wanted to dig further into some of these.
Dominance Orientation vs Prestige Orientation
Psychologichal research on dominance-based status versus prestige-based status illustrates two methods of gaining influence:
Some people gain influence by building trust, sharing expertise, helping others succeed, being respected voluntarily - a prestige strategy
Others gain influence through intimidation, hierarchy, criticism, social positioning, making others feel lesser - a dominance strategy
Research suggests that prestige-oriented people tend to reconcile, collaborate, and maintain relationships more effectively, because their status depends on others willingly respecting them. Dominance-oriented people rely more on coercion and power asymmetry.
And project management, particularly modern cross-functional PM work, is heavily prestige-based: the PM has influence without authority, must be able to coalition-build, and negotiate alignment across boundaries.
A PM who instinctively defaults to hierarchy and combativeness can struggle because projects depend on voluntary cooperation as much as formal governance.
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
Another relevant concept is Social Dominance Orientation, which refers to how strongly someone believes hierarchies are natural, desirable, or necessary. People high in SDO tend to accept unequal power relationships, endorse harsh supervisory tactics, prefer “superior/subordinate” dynamics and respond less naturally to egalitarian collaboration models.
Some people genuinely orient towards vertical (often binary) social structures:
competent/incompetent
winners/losers
strong/weak
high-status/low-status
Whereas collaborative operators tend to orient horizontally - peer capability, interdependence, mutual success.
References
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165-196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4 [pubmed.ncb...lm.nih.gov]
Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(4), 741-763. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.4.741 [dash.harvard.edu]
CIPD. (2024). Psychological Safety and Trust: Evidence Review Summary. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Aiello, A., Pratto, F., & Pierro, A. (2013). Framing Social Dominance. University of Connecticut Working Paper.
Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., & Anderson, C. (2014 onwards). Research programme on dominance and prestige as alternative routes to social rank. A useful overview is available in recent reviews of prestige and dominance-based leadership.