Winners Take All; Targets Are Losers

Without the marvelous book Winner Take-All Society by Robert Frank and Philip Cook, this explanation would have been labeled Americans' love of competition. We revere winners and have no "mental shelf space" left for also-rans, the losers.

It's a pervasive marketplace mindset that has invaded our social relationships. The vast majority of riches go to the privileged few at the top of any profession, sport or hiearchy. In a way, the classic American competitive zeal encourages us to denigrate luckless targets of bullying and elevate the bully. After all, if the workplace is war, the conqueror (even if she's a bully) gets the post-game interview while the vanquished retreats unnoticed and unloved.

Competition requires scarcity. There has to be a limited pool of possible rewards--monetary and social--over which workers have to fight. At work, social goodies can be as simple as civilized conversation, decent humane treatment, empathy for another's pain, and personal time given to someone who needs nothing more than the validation that companionship or an open mind can provide. These "resources" are not scarce. They are limitless. Yet, the bully and their accomplices by virtue of witnessing but taking no action hoarde them. By doling praise and kindness in a miserly way, the bully controls the competition.

We naively refer to the "free market" competition as if the game is fair. In fact the distribution of opportunities always tilts toward the powerful. In organizations, bullies control opportunitites (especially the Gatekeeper style bully); those whom they designated as targets don't have a chance. Yet, companies blithely credit bullies with winning and treat targets like losers. Hey, the game is rigged!

It is unthinkable that we treat bullies decently at work, while ignoring the deliberate harm they cause to others. It's just that we just can't seem to stop keeping score in social relationships as if they were sports.

What we score as success is screwed up, too. We place a high value on the size of a person's workstation, type of chair, type of benefits for which she's eligible, window or interior cubicle, basement or penthouse office, day or graveyard shift, expense account or out of pocket, and so on. Success is defined by relative standing rather than absolute performance. When bullies deliberately keep others down, we should not unfairly discard them as "losers," but many people, including witnesses to the atrocities, do.

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