Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both by Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer

negative and started to harm performance.
    When there is too much talent, the stars and high-status individuals compete among themselves to establish who the alpha dog is. As Corinne Bendersky of UCLA has shown, these status conflicts hurt group performance. With too many people at the top, individual competition dominates, and cooperation and coordination break down. It is like two bosses who can’t agree on how to play the Coordination Game we described earlier.
    The idea that a pecking order is critical for success comes from, well, chickens. As you could imagine, egg sellers want to produce a lot of eggs. So it makes sense that they would selectively breed the highest-egg-producing chickens. But something goes terribly wrong when you place a high number of the best egg-producing chickens in one colony. Total cage-wide production plummets! Even worse, chicken deaths skyrocket! Why? Because, the best egg producers also happen to be the most competitive birds, and when they are brought together, they begin fighting over food, space, and territory. They peck each other to death. For chickens, businessmen, and basketball players alike, high levels of performance come with high levels of competitive spirit. These status conflicts drive performance down.
    The fact that too many dominant people in a group can impair performance is related to our earlier discussion about power. Remember we showed that simply having people think about a time in which they had power increased their confidence and assertiveness. But we’ve all witnessed conflicts when there are too many assertive people in a room. So we wondered what would happen if we primed
everyone
in a group with power: Would they end up squabbling like chickens and peck at each other?
    To find out, we ran the following experiment. We had groups engage in a task that required coordination: create sentences where at least one word had to come from each group member. To succeed, group members had to successfully integrate their individual efforts.
    Before the sentence task, we manipulated how many members of each group felt powerful: In the all-high-power condition, each member of a three-person group reflected on and wrote about a time in which they had power. In the all-low-power condition, each of the three members thought about a time in which they lacked power. In the hierarchy condition, we had only
one
of the group members think about a time in which they had power.
    Our findings confirmed our suspicions: Groups in which all three members felt powerful descended into fierce battles for control—like the high-egg-producing chickens and basketball teams with too much talent—and thus performed worse. The groups in which no one felt powerful didn’t fare any better. Here the group members all lacked agency, with too many followers milling around in search of a leader. Instead, it was the hierarchical group—the group where only one member was primed with power—that performed the best out of the three.
    We then conducted a follow-up experiment with a biological marker of power and dominance—testosterone. If you want to know how much testosterone you were exposed to when you were in your mother’s womb, take a look at your hand and focus on your ring and index fingers. It has been shown that the ratio between the length of the ring finger and the index finger is a marker of in utero testosterone exposure. If your ring finger is considerably longer than your index finger, you were exposed to greater levels of testosterone back in your mom’s womb. If your two fingers are similar in length, it indicates that you were exposed to less testosterone in utero. It may seem ridiculous to use finger length to determine anything about a person’s behavior. But there is evidence that high levels of prenatal testosterone exposure makes people sensitive to threats to their place on the hierarchical ladder. High-testosterone people, in other words, are more likely to feel