The American view: The performance review Hunger Games

Business pundits often claim that trust is “essential” to a high-performing team. Workers, the pundits suggest, must trust that their leaders selflessly have their workers’ best interests at heart, not just the shareholders’ or upper management’s interests.

Leaders, in turn, must trust that their subordinates are diligently following orders and avoid the temptation to meddle when it’s not absolutely necessary. I’ve read variations on this idea in a ton of management books dating back to the 1980s. It’s so common a concept that it’s treated as gospel … but my experience tells me that it’s purely aspirational “visioneering.” The corpo world doesn’t work like that.

Our economic model is structured around the idea of constant competition: the boss ideally holds all the power in the relationship while the worker holds little, if any, power at all. Each worker is an individual competitor, not a contributor. Every other worker is advertised as a constant threat, as there are only so many positions, so many raises, sand o many advancement opportunities to go around. Therefore, the bosses play favourites and pit workers against each other.

Why else would workers’ annual raises be based on rank-ordered lists? Someone must be at the top and someone else at the bottom; HR won’t accept a population that’s all “top blocked.” Hence, the need for workers to constantly scramble for the next higher rung in the “order of merit list” with all advancement coming at the cost of a peer’s success and security.

This competition between workers manifests in several complimentary ways. As a “corporate death game” contender, you’re told you can improve your “competitiveness” by:

• Improving your performance such that you outshine the person above you
• Sabotaging the performance of the person above you so that they lose favour
• Allying with a competitor above or below you to team up against others
• Advocating for the person on top of the list to be promoted out of the team
• Advocating for an under-qualified new hire to be added below your rung
• Switching teams to one where you outshine the current “best player”

This is default corpo life in 2026. Notice what I didn’t put in the list: “delivering shareholder value.” That trite phrase doesn’t make the list because it’s not a real thing; it’s an aspirational statement that sounds business-y but means nothing. I also didn’t say anything about “meeting performance targets” because those are arbitrary, capricious, and only useful for a hostile supervisor to aid or harm their subordinates so as to advance their own agenda.