The Hidden Cost of Stack-Ranking Your Own People

We tend to think of the competitive, outperform-everyone leader as a net positive. They drive results, they push standards. They can sharpen and focus the organization. The research backs a good part of that instinct. Leaders who strive to outperform their peers show greater effort, persistence, and a stronger pull toward value-creating opportunities.

A new study in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology tells the other half of the story. Van Strydonck and colleagues tracked 631 employees and 221 of their managers across three survey waves, then replicated the core finding with a second sample of software engineers. What they found is that leaders chasing performance-approach goals don’t just risk harming the organization through their own behavior. They harm it indirectly by changing how they talk to their people.

The mechanism is comparative feedback. A leader who sees the world through a competitive lens starts evaluating employees the same way they evaluate themselves: relative to everyone else. “You’re behind Sarah on close rates.” “You’re outperforming the rest of the team this quarter.” Both versions land harder than they’re intended. The study found that comparative feedback was positively related to emotional exhaustion, regardless of whether the comparison was favorable or unfavorable, and that exhaustion in turn predicted counterproductive work behavior such as withdrawal, reduced effort, and quiet distancing from the work.

Telling someone they’re winning is exhausting, too. The employee who outperforms peers feels the pressure to keep doing it, the anxiety of a coming slip, and the quiet strain of being a target for resentment. The leader thinks they’re handing out a reward. The employee’s nervous system processes a threat.

Here’s where we’d extend the authors’ reading. They frame this as a feedback problem, and at the surface level, it is. But the deeper issue is relationship infrastructure. Comparative feedback isn’t just a single bad sentence in a one-on-one. It is a standing condition of the working environment. The study describes employees carrying “a constant heightened mental load,” running continuous micro-appraisals of where they stand. That’s not a feedback event. That’s the architecture of the relationship itself, redesigned around ranking. And architecture is what determines whose development actually emerges and whose energy gets spent managing position instead of doing the work.

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This is also where our familiar gap between strategy and execution shows up. Most leaders, if asked, would say they want to develop their people. Which is a great intention. But the enacted behavior, a comparative frame, applied daily under pressure, teaches the opposite lesson. Knowing you should develop people and being able to do it when you’re wired to compete are two different capabilities, and the second one doesn’t come naturally.

The authors land on the right move, and it aligns with what we’ve seen hold up in practice: throughout the year, while people are still working toward their goals, anchor feedback to the employee’s own trajectory. Compare them to where they were, not to the colleague three desks over. Save the social comparisons for the formal evaluation moments where they genuinely belong.

That shift sounds small. Yet, it’s the difference between a relationship built to surface someone’s growth and one built to remind them, every week, exactly where they rank. One of those gets your train through. The other quietly thins your ranks while the dashboard still looks fine.

Drawn from Van Strydonck, I., Decramer, A., Anseel, F., & Audenaert, M. (2026). Leaders’ performance goals and employees’ counterproductive work behaviour: the mediating role of comparative feedback. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2026.2673975