Outshining Your Rival: Interpersonal Rivalry and Its Effects on Organizational Contributions

We theorize that competing with an interpersonal rival from another organization has a divergent cross-level effect: employees increase their visible individual contributions, but their total contributions to the organization decrease. Striving to outshine their rivals, employees focus on visible individual contributions that are easily observable and readily attributable. We advance three mechanisms through which this focus can reduce employees’ total contributions to the organization: crowding out of less visible contributions, excessive risk taking, and organizational overreliance. Using data from the National Basketball Association, we find support for the hypothesized divergent effect and show that the results are robust to multiple model specifications, operationalizations, and alternative explanations. Our results suggest that employees respond to their rivals’ visible contributions, using them as a benchmark for social comparison. Exploring the mechanisms, we find support for excessive risk taking and organizational overreliance, but mixed evidence for crowding out of less visible contributions. Our study advances emergent cross-level perspectives on rivalry by highlighting that its positive and negative effects are unevenly distributed across organizational levels—the rivalry-induced focus on visible individual contributions comes at the organization’s expense. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18649 .