I recently published an article which discussed the difference between winning and succeeding. The predominant point I made in that article is that the drive to win is a dangerous thing and should be replaced in 
ourselves by the drive to succeed. The reason for this is that the drive to win can just as easily result in attempts to bring others down. The drive to succeed however is solely a matter of raising oneself up.
The ramifications of this is that we should be wary of soliciting a competitive ethic in our organisations. In many organisations there is the view that you get the best performance when you get your employees to compete with each other. It is clear that the health of the organisation will be determined by the level of performance of each of the individuals fulfilling a function for that organisation. The idea then makes a bit of sense, in order to have a healthy and successful organisation we must find some way of motivating employees to go the extra mile; to raise their game as it were. Competition is the easiest tool in such an instance. Get them to raise their own game by making them strive to beat their colleagues.
Unfortunately using competition as a tool to get high performance out of employees will inevitably back fire. At best you will end up with a very few number of highly engaged high performers with a majority of disengaged low performers. At worst however you will end up with a toxic climate of political maneuvering and sabotage between the competing employees. You run the risk of creating war in your organisation like the war you see between rival football clubs. An organisation with this political climate will expend much of its energy on fighting itself instead of serving the customer.
This point of how misinformed it is to solicit competition between colleagues is hammered home with a real life example Etsko Schuitema shared with me in a comment on the above mentioned article. He said and I quote:
“When we just started this business we had a client in the coal mining industry. One of their senior managers had two mine overseer sections in his department, and he decided that he would maximize production in his department by getting these two mine overseers to compete.
The competition was monthly and the prize was a braai (barbecue) for the winning section at the end of the month. The one mine overseer lost the competition consistently because he was mining in an area where there was a lot unforseen dykes and intrusions in the seam he was mining.
After having lost the competition consistently for a good number of months he instructed one of his shift bosses to drive a spike into the opposing section’s conveyor belt. They cut 15km of conveyor belt in two in revenge!”
This example illustrates as clear as day the dangers of soliciting competition between colleagues. The end goal that sits behind using 
competition as a tool is however dead right. We do of course want to create the conditions in which people raise their game, go the extra mile and perform to a very high standard. We must not however use competition in order to achieve this. What other strategy is open to us? Schuitema Associates thinks that the answer is Care and Growth. For more on Care and Growth see here.