A Debate about Navigating Workplace Undermining and Job Insecurity

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Debate. Imagine showing up to work tomorrow morning, pouring your coffee, opening your laptop, and knowing that, well, in order for you to keep your job, the person sitting right next to you has to lose theirs. Yeah, not exactly a recipe for a great Tuesday morning. Right? I mean, would you help them out with a project? Would you share your best ideas with them?

[00:00:20] According to this massive November 2026 survey we were looking at, 69% of U.S. workers are already experiencing active sabotage from their own colleagues. 69%? That is just... 69%. It's wild. It really is. We are talking about critical information being deliberately hidden, blame being shifted, and, you know, ideas just being flat out stolen. And it is not because HR suddenly hired a bunch of bad people. It is because the environment is practically designed to make them fight.

[00:00:48] It really is an alarming environment right now. I mean, we are operating against a deeply unsettling macroeconomic backdrop here. By October of 2026 alone, we saw over 617,000 job cuts across the market. Yeah, the numbers are grim. And the anxiety isn't just about the economy dipping. Roughly one in five of those cuts were directly attributed to artificial intelligence. So the nature of the work itself is actively threatening the worker. Exactly. It is the absolute definition of a systemic pressure cooker.

[00:01:16] And that brings us to the core disagreement we are exploring today. When an organization's workforce feels this intense level of existential threat, how do you actually go about restoring cooperation? Which is a million-dollar question. Right. So I will be arguing that workplace undermining is a highly rational, calculated economic response to zero-sum incentive structures.

[00:01:37] If you want to fix this, you cannot just lecture people on company values or, like, police their behavior. You have to fundamentally overhaul the formal evaluation and reward structures to make cooperation the safer bet for survival.

[00:01:48] And I will be arguing that formal incentive shifts are completely insufficient on their own, without explicit, localized cultural enforcement. You can change the compensation formula and the grading rubric all you want, but permissive norms, social ambiguity, and a fundamental lack of psychological safety, those are the true drivers of workplace sabotage. If the culture doesn't actively enforce trust, the structure just doesn't matter.

[00:02:13] Okay. So let's lay out our foundations here. When I look at this data, again, over 600,000 job cuts, the looming shadow of AI automation, I see a workforce operating under extreme job preservation motivation. Sure. People are scared. They are terrified. And the problem is how companies traditionally manage that pressure. When leadership relies on relative, winner-take-all evaluation systems, you know, like stack ranking or forced curves, they inadvertently weaponize their own org chart.

[00:02:40] They take a team of collaborators and turn them into direct rivals. You're referring to the promotion tournament models, right? Yes, exactly. Think about Chen's model of promotion tournaments. In a closed system where only one person can get the promotion, or, say, only the top 10% get a bonus, the most able candidates, the actual top performers, attract the most sabotage from their peers. Because they are the biggest threat. Exactly. Why work harder when you can just trip the guy in front of you?

[00:03:06] If you are an average worker, the most efficient way to improve your relative standing isn't to work 50% harder. That's exhausting. And honestly, it might not even work. The most efficient way is to quietly trip the frontrunner. It does seem incredibly cynical, but the math works out. The math absolutely works. And the terrifying result is that the organization ends up promoting the best saboteur rather than the best performer.

[00:03:30] My position is that you cannot simply train people out of this self-protection mechanism. When survival is on the line, you have to fundamentally alter the structural reward systems. So what does that actually look like in practice? Take a company like Nucor, the steel manufacturer. They famously implemented weekly team production bonuses. And crucially, there was no cap. When your paycheck physically increases on Friday because your teammate did a better job on Tuesday, your collective success suddenly aligns with individual survival. Right.

[00:03:58] You don't have to like your teammate, but you will absolutely help them. Structure dictates behavior. Well, I come at it from a different way. I certainly don't disagree that economic pressures are real and terrifying right now. But the assumption that formal economic structures entirely dictate behavior ignores the incredibly messy reality of human psychology. Messy how?

[00:04:21] People are rarely purely rational economic actors, you know, sitting at their desks calculating the exact return on investment of a sabotage attempt. If you dive into the research by Duffy and her colleagues on workplace envy, they found that envy only mutates into actual undermining in teams where permissive norms allow for something called moral disengagement. Meaning they convince themselves the bad behavior doesn't actually count? Precisely. Moral disengagement is that quite cognitive process where you justify crossing a line.

[00:04:51] You tell yourself, well, everyone else is doing it or the boss doesn't care anyway or she stole my idea last month so we're just even. Ah, the classic rationalization. Right. You can add a formal collaboration metric to an annual performance review all you want, but it means absolutely nothing if the underlying culture allows people to mentally excuse their own toxicity. There was a fascinating study by Sarenko and Bontis on knowledge workers and credit unions. They wanted to see what actually stopped people from hoarding information.

[00:05:21] And let me guess, the formal rules didn't work. They had literally zero effect. They found that formal knowledge management policies, official sharing systems, structural incentives, zero effect on stopping knowledge hiding. None. Wow. The only variable that consistently stopped it was a trust-based climate. Organizational solutions have to rely on strict behavioral accountability. Uber is actually the perfect case study for this. Back in 2017, they had to do a massive cultural rewrite. Right. Why?

[00:05:50] Because they had these explicit company values like toe-stepping and principled confrontation. Yeah, which sounds great in a startup pitch deck. Right. It sounds greedy and innovative. But in practice, those values were being actively used to excuse incredibly aggressive, toxic behavior. They weren't fighting over a force curve. They were operating in a culture that gave them a free pass to be jerks. Uber had to systematically rewrite those norms to explicitly value doing the right thing.

[00:06:17] Because ultimately, culture eats structural incentives for breakfast. Let's dig into that root cause, though, because I think this is where our perspectives really diverge. You mentioned envy and permissive norms allowing for moral disengagement. But where does that envy come from? Why do they feel the need to disengage morally in the first place? Well, human nature, partly. But it is exacerbated by the environment. I look at Sharola and Potessa's findings, which clearly show that economic downturns explicitly promote what they call a zero-sum construal of success.

[00:06:46] The idea that the pie is shrinking. Exactly. It is the deeply held visceral belief that one person's gain is mathematically another's loss. How can we possibly expect employees not to undermine each other when their economic survival is literally tangibly on the line? Because we expect adults to act like professionals? But a forced curve is like putting a single life raft on a sinking ship. You cannot just put up a nice sign asking people to form an orderly line and expect psychological safety. The math of the situation guarantees a brawl.

[00:07:16] Look at Meta's decision back in January 2025. Oh, right. The efficiency cuts. Yeah. They announced they were cutting roughly 5% of their staff, and they explicitly labeled those departing employees as low performers. When a company uses peer-relative criteria like that, it instantly, fundamentally changes the psychology of the room. It definitely raises the temperature. It makes every single colleague around you stop being a teammate and become a potential threat to your mortgage.

[00:07:42] If being at the bottom of the distribution means you lose your livelihood, the most logical, self-preserving thing you can do is make sure someone else looks worse than you. It isn't a lack of cultural trust. It is a perfectly calibrated response to an economic threat. But you are still framing the execution of that undermining as this highly calculated Machiavellian strategy. And the reality of daily work is that a vast amount of undermining thrives not on calculation but on natural egocentric biases. Our brains trick us.

[00:08:10] Trick us into sabotaging people? Trick us into thinking we deserve more credit than we do. Trick us into thinking we do. Think about the research by Schroeder on responsibility judgments. They ran these studies where they would ask members of a collaborative group to independently estimate their own percentage of contribution to a finished project. The claims routinely summed to well over 100%, sometimes 150%. Because everyone thinks they did the heavy lifting. Exactly. But it's not because they are evil or trying to survive a layoff.

[00:08:38] It is because of an egocentric availability bias. Our brains basically have a highlight reel of our own late nights, our own stress, our own brilliant ideas and the sheer effort we put in. That makes sense. We don't see the sweat of our coworkers. Right. We just see their finished product. So when 19% of people in that survey say their work or ideas were claimed by someone else, a large chunk of that isn't a calculated tournament strategy to win the meta-life raft.

[00:09:03] It is Bob genuinely believing he did 60% of the work and Sarah genuinely believing she did 60% of the work. So it's just an honest mistake? It's ambiguity. The undermining happens because the environment is ambiguous and our brains fill in the gaps in our own favor. That is why credit taking thrives, not just because of a forced curve, but because leadership fails to make attribution a routine, explicit cultural practice. Okay. I will grant you that egocentric bias plays a huge role in accidental credit disputes.

[00:09:32] We do all have that highlight reel playing in our heads. But ambiguity only becomes a weapon when the environment practically requires you to use it. How so? If the stakes are low, Sarah and Bob can figure it out. If the stakes are termination, Bob is going to make sure his 60% is the only 60% management sees. But if we accept that it is hard to figure out who did what, how do we actually solve it in the moment? Because this naturally pushes us into the debate over the flow of information. Right. The knowledge hiding issue.

[00:10:02] Yeah. The literature calls this knowledge hiding. Charney and his colleagues identified this fascinating destructive phenomenon called the reciprocal distrust loop. Have you seen this? Yes, where hiding information basically creates a localized arms race. Exactly. It's brilliant and terrifying. When an employee hides knowledge, maybe they keep a key piece of code to themselves, or they don't share a client's specific preference because they want to look indispensable. It actually backfires. Because the team catches on. Right.

[00:10:29] The hiding reduces their own creativity because they are so focused on protecting their turf. But worse, coworkers sense the hiding. And what do they do? They simply stop sharing with that person in return. It's a self-reinforcing arms race of silence. It is incredibly toxic. I see why you think that behavioral norms are the key here, but let me give you a different perspective. You cannot just ask people to trust each other and expect this arms race to de-escalate. To break that loop, the formal performance framework has to change. You have to look at a model like Atlassian's.

[00:10:59] Oh, I know this one. Yeah, they completely revamped their evaluation system to weight team contribution equally with role expectations. Right, they made collaboration an actual grade. A massive part of the grade. One-third of your entire performance rating is explicitly tied to how you lift teammates up, how you share knowledge, and how you build trust. And they formally document it. You have to prove you helped someone else. So they formalize the culture. By changing the rubric, they force the structural recognition of cooperation.

[00:11:26] You can't hide knowledge if your bonus depends on proving you shared it. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that. Let me tell you why. Formal rating rubrics are incredibly easy to game if the underlying climate is strictly performance-oriented rather than mastery-oriented. What do you mean by gaming it? Well, if you tell a hyper-competitive, anxious workforce that they now have to score a 4 out of 5 on collaboration to keep their jobs, they won't suddenly become truly collaborative. They will just start performing collaboration for the metrics.

[00:11:56] Performing it? Yes. They will CC the boss on emails offering help, or they will set up redundant knowledge-sharing meetings that waste everyone's time just to check the box. True knowledge-sharing requires a profound sense of psychological safety that no rubric can mandate. It requires a system-first investigation of failures. Explain the mechanism there. How does investigating a failure stop knowledge hiding? Because hiding information is fundamentally a threat response. If you want people to open up, you have to remove the threat.

[00:12:26] Look at Toyota's manufacturing process. The Andon cord is a perfect example. Any line worker can pull a physical cord to halt the entire multi-million dollar production line if they see a defect. Which is a huge deal. Massive. But when they do that, the manager doesn't run over with a clipboard and demand to know who messed up. They run over and say, thank you for highlighting a problem. Let's fix the process. Virginia Mason Medical Center adapted this exact same principle into patient safety alerts for their hospitals.

[00:12:55] Right, for medical errors. When a tragic error occurs, like a mix-up of unlabeled solutions in a surgical bay, leadership explicitly declares that the failure lies in the system, not the individual. The psychological shift there is immense. It changes the brain's posture from defense to problem solving. Taking the target off their back. Exactly. It is the absolute safety from individual blame, not a compensation formula that stops knowledge hiding.

[00:13:21] If people are terrified of being the scapegoat, which, by the way, 30% of workers in that survey reported experiencing, no Atlassian-style rubric will make them open up. They will just hide the truth better. But notice exactly what Toyota and Virginia Mason did there. They built a formal structural mechanism. The Andon cord is a physical tool. The safety alert system is a documented protocol. They fundamentally altered the power dynamic of the workplace. Through cultural practice. But procedurally.

[00:13:50] They didn't just tell managers to be nicer or, like, host a seminar on trust. They structurally, procedurally removed the penalty for surfacing errors. So we are actually converging on the idea that systems matter deeply. But I want to push back on your reliance on culture with a very specific edge case. Okay. Hit me. What happens when these frameworks collide with the incredibly high producer who simply refuses to collaborate? The so-called brilliant jerk. Ah, the person who brings in all the revenue but destroys the team in the process. Right.

[00:14:20] Carpenter ran laboratory experiments on this, and the evidence is damning. They show that in tournament conditions where workers are competing for a limited pool of rewards, the mere anticipation of sabotage, just the office politics alone, actively decreases overall output. Because people check out. Exactly. When workers know they might be sabotaged by the brilliant jerk, they proactively reduce their own effort. Why try if the jerk is just going to steal the credit?

[00:14:43] My argument is that if you change the structure, if you eliminate forced curves entirely, you naturally weed out these saboteurs. By removing their hunting ground. Yeah. Look at Microsoft. For years, their stack ranking system was cited as one of their most destructive internal processes. It pushed brilliant engineers to compete internally against each other rather than against Apple or Google. When they finally ended it in 2013, or, you know, when Adobe replaced their rank and yank system with continuous check-ins, the return on investment for being a saboteur dropped dramatically.

[00:15:13] If you remove the relative tournament, the brilliant jerk loses their incentive to be a jerk. The behavior corrects itself because the math changes. That's a compelling argument, but have you considered that removing the curve is entirely insufficient on its own? Some people do not require a forced curve to undermine their peers. You think they just do it for fun? I think they aren't doing it for a bonus. They are driven by ego, status, and unchecked ambition. They want to be the smartest person in the room regardless of the pay structure.

[00:15:41] Explicit, punitive enforcement is absolutely required. You cannot just remove the tournament and hope that brilliant jerk spontaneously develops empathy. Organizations must systematically target bad behavior regardless of the person's status or output. But how do you actually catch them if there's no forced curve exposing the tension? Through rigorous peer accountability. Consider Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Hospitals are notoriously hierarchical, and they struggle with brilliant but toxic surgeons.

[00:16:10] A classic brilliant jerk scenario. The ultimate one. They developed the core's peer reporting system to track unprofessional behavior among physicians. Over a four-year period, they found that 9.1% of physicians received co-worker reports for undermining behavior. But here is the critical part. Fewer than 1% received two or more. So the system worked to identify the real problems. By having a system that tracked this, they were able to isolate the true repeat offenders, the actual brilliant jerks, and intervene.

[00:16:40] Or look at Netflix. Their culture memo is legendary for its strict no brilliant jerks mandate. They explicitly state that exceptional performance does not excuse treating colleagues poorly. And they actually enforce that? They don't just say it. They actually fire top performers over it. Without robust, non-retaliatory peer feedback mechanisms and leaders who are willing to terminate high performers who poison the well, those high performers will just continue to undermine quietly. Curve or no curve.

[00:17:09] I hear that. And look, I respect the Netflix approach. But enforcing a no brilliant jerks policy requires accurate data on who the jerks actually are. And as Chen's model demonstrated earlier, in a highly competitive system, the information that reaches decision makers is deeply distorted. How so? Saboteurs are brilliant at managing up. They steal the credit in private. They shift the blame in casual conversations. By the time management realizes there's a toxic element on the team and starts looking for the bad apple,

[00:17:36] the saboteur has already successfully framed their victim as the low performer. That is a dark view of management's awareness. It is the reality of tournament structures. If you don't fix the economic structure first, your peer reporting system just becomes another weapon for the saboteur to use. They will just file false reports against their rivals. Which is exactly why I argue that localized, trust-based climates and routine attribution are your primary defenses. You can't manage up and steal credit if the team's culture doesn't allow secrets. Meaning everything is out in the open.

[00:18:04] Right. If a team has a daily practice of making work in progress visible, the saboteur has nowhere to hide. Look at Pixar's brain trust model. Unfinished, messy work is shared openly with the group, and candor is protected. When the work is visible from day one, it becomes virtually impossible for a saboteur to steal credit six months later. The receipts are all there. The origins of ideas are traceable. And when mistakes do happen, cultural repair is essential. Zweig's research on knowledge theft showed that victims' anger subsides significantly

[00:18:34] when leaders quickly and publicly affirm who rightfully owned the idea. It is a cultural practice of public repair. That makes a lot of sense. You don't need to rebuild your entire payroll structure to start naming originators in the room and correcting misattributions on the spot. It is the active, daily enforcement of these micro-social norms that creates the psychological safety net. Well, I think we are reaching a really fascinating point of synthesis here. We are looking at two sides of the same organizational coin. I agree. To summarize my position in light of our discussion,

[00:19:03] While I fully acknowledge that interpersonal norms, public repair, and psychological safety are absolutely critical to a functioning workplace, I maintain that they can only truly thrive on a foundation of fair, non-relative evaluation structures. Right. You simply cannot demand trust, vulnerability, and collaboration from your employees while simultaneously forcing them into a survival of the fittest tournament. If the blueprint of your organization resembles a sinking ship with only one life raft, you cannot fix the resulting panic by writing a nicer code of conduct.

[00:19:33] You have to build more life rafts. You have to align collective success with individual reward. Structure dictates the baseline of rational behavior. And to summarize my stance, while I agree that compensation incentives shouldn't actively pit employees against one another, because, let's face it, no one wants to work in a gladiator arena, a theoretically cooperative economic system remains an empty shell without the active daily enforcement of psychological safety. Yeah, it has to be lived out.

[00:20:00] We can design the most equitable pay structures in the world, we can abolish the curve, but human beings remain complex, egocentric, and prone to moral disengagement under stress. Without routine attribution, without blame-free problem reporting like the Andon Court, and without peer accountability mechanisms that hold even the highest performers responsible for their behavior, the culture of cooperation will ultimately fail. The structural blueprint doesn't matter if you let toxicity weather the building from the inside.

[00:20:28] We both clearly agree on the core finding from the source material. Workplace undermining is not simply a collection of bad apples or, you know, difficult personalities that just slip through the interview process. Definitely not. It is a highly predictable organizational failure caused by systems and climates placed under intense strain. Whether it is a fear of macroeconomic layoffs or the looming existential shadow of AI automation, the pressure of the modern workplace is exposing the cracks in how we manage and reward human capital. Absolutely.

[00:20:58] We both agree that addressing this crisis requires a deep understanding of multiple facets of organizational design. You cannot view HR policies, compensation structures, and team culture as isolated silos. They interact dynamically every single day to determine whether an employee perceives cooperation as a dangerous risk or the rational choice. The tension between structural economics and cultural enforcement remains an incredibly rich area for further analysis. Which lever is more powerful?

[00:21:25] Does the org chart mold the culture or does the culture overwrite the org chart? It is a great question to take back to your own teams. Exactly. We leave that for our listeners to reflect on in their own experiences. Ultimately, when you step back and look at the structural integrity of your own workplace architecture, the real question is, when the pressure builds, is your design holding people together or is it quietly tearing them apart? We leave that for our listeners to look at the