When my colleague is my enemy

Here is a question for anyone who has a job: Who is your competitor?

In our capitalist system, it’s the people selling rival products or services. For the hairdresser, it’s the other shop down the street. For the auto worker, it’s the foreign auto sales rooms. For the performer, it’s the other show. For the official, it’s the other person or agency competing for votes or budget.

Rivalry of this sort is good. It fits the basic fact of life that living, let alone thriving, requires us to grow beyond who we were yesterday. In this sense we compete with ourselves. Meeting challenges, we grow and improve. We can see how, both personally and institutionally, over time we fester and decline when challenges are non-existent or avoided.

This is not to say that everyone approaches life grimly with clenched fists. In meeting challenges and in competing, we cooperate with other people.

But in Korea, we face a complication in that in many settings, people are disposed to compete with the very people they are also required to cooperate with.

I was reminded of this recently when an industry expert told me something about K-pop performers that struck me as counterintuitive. For many idols, other groups do not feel like the main rivals. Their harshest competition lies within their own group.

The expert was not talking about the recruitment process. In the K-pop world, as we know, groups are not created by their members like traditional rock acts. They are formed by entertainment companies who bear the costs and treat them like employees. At this stage, some trainees get cut from the program for one reason or another.

You would think that post-debut, the survivors would be best friends. Of course, they may well be. The industry is too diverse to generalize. Still, the idea of rivalry resonates. Within a group, members compete for lines, screen time, popularity rankings, endorsement deals, and ultimately long-term career survival.

In other words, while external competition is there, the most immediate and tangible rival is the person beside you.

Once you notice this pattern, it becomes difficult to unsee – not just in entertainment, but across Korean society.

I encountered something similar years ago in journalism. Reporters here typically operate within tightly organized press clubs attached to the government ministry, agency or major conglomerate. Reporters will spend most of their time physically based there, alongside journalists from rival outlets covering the same beat.

Formally, they are competitors. But in practice, they often function more like colleagues.

I had a dinner appointment once with a reporter when there was a big story related to the ministry she covered. She thought we might have to postpone, but she turned up smiling: The reporters had all agreed not to write anything until the next day.

She explained that her real competitors were not those journalists sitting beside her from other newspapers, but colleagues back at their own newsroom — the ones after the same promotions, recognition and editorial influence.

This was truly puzzling. Why would competition be directed inward rather than outward?

The answer, I suspect, lies deeper than corporate culture or industry structure. It begins much earlier — in the classroom.

Korea’s education system has long been defined by intense competition and rankings. From an early age, students are sorted, scored and compared, often with extraordinary precision. Class rankings, exam results and university admissions create a clear, numerical hierarchy. Success is not merely about meeting a standard or being better than you were yesterday. It is about outperforming those around you.

As you can imagine, when there’s only one gold medal to give out, most people are losers.

By the time students enter the workforce, this mindset is deeply ingrained. The habit of measuring oneself against peers does not disappear. It simply transfers to a new setting.

You see it in the media habit of ranking companies. The chairmen of Samsung, Hyundai, SK and LG always get to sit next to the president. Why? They are the most highly ranked companies and thus the most worthy. Everyone refers to Kim & Chang as Korea’s “leading” law firm. What makes it so? Apparently, it’s because it has more lawyers than any other. This ranking is code for “best.” But why the need to rank them in the first place?

For employers, internal rivalry has advantages. It can drive high performance, discipline and attention to detail. It can foster resilience and a relentless work ethic. These qualities that have undoubtedly contributed to Korea’s rapid economic and political development and cultural rise.

But it comes with costs. When competition becomes internalized, collaboration can become more fragile. It is no quirk of history that the two Koreas claim to be dedicated to reunification and yet have not managed a single, credible step in that direction in 80 years.

Trust is hard to sustain in such a culture. Energy gets absorbed in what should be peripheral. Organizations may find themselves less focused on outperforming external rivals than on managing internal rivalries.

In a globalized economy, where Korean companies, media and cultural products compete on an international stage, this distinction matters. The question is not whether competition exists in Korea. It clearly does, and at an intense level. The question is who we feel we are really competing with.

It should not be the person sitting right next to us.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.