The Law of the Jungle Behind the Mask of Meritocracy

Many businesses today promote a culture of meritocracy, equal opportunity, and ethical leadership. In practice, however, this facade often conceals an environment governed by the law of the jungle: a system of unwritten rules, personal strategies, and office politics that systematically undermine those who could make a real difference. This hypocrisy constitutes the hubris that leads to nemesis: organisational decay, the exodus of the most capable, increased operational costs, and the gradual erosion of moral cohesion within the team.

Behind the facade of collaboration, mechanisms often operate with the real goal not being team empowerment, but the preservation of power by individuals or sub-groups who feel threatened. The appropriation of others’ results, the distortion of performance evaluations, deliberate exclusion from projects, meetings, and updates, the spreading of rumours, and - particularly insidious - the use of intentional delays and procedural slowdowns, are all tactics of indirect sabotage. Team members, aware that delay harms specific colleagues or derails developments, choose to withhold timely responses, distort timelines, or postpone crucial phases of collaboration. These practices constitute forms of internal sabotage which, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has discussed in the context of organisational loss, follow a dynamic of denial, resistance, and ultimately, decline. They do not arise randomly, but flourish in environments where mediocrity is protected and excellence becomes a source of discomfort. The notion of "molecular sabotage," as described in modern studies of team dysfunction (see Manz & Sims, 1993), aptly captures these behaviours: small, consistent interventions designed to preserve mediocrity as the standard.

The roots of this pathology lie both in human psychology and in power structures. Envy, insecurity, and fear of exposure lead to self-protective micro-political manoeuvres. Festinger's theory of social comparison confirms that in environments lacking objective evaluation criteria, people tend to safeguard their relative status by downgrading others. Simultaneously, organisations lacking ethical leadership, with opaque evaluation processes and cultures of silence or worse, leadership that actively perpetuates these patterns - institutionalise decline. Pfeffer's research ("Power and Politics in Organisations", 1992) demonstrates that the absence of institutional boundaries leads to the empowerment of the most cynical and aggressive control mechanisms.

The cost is heavy and, at first, invisible. The departure of competent individuals does not happen suddenly - it is preceded by a phase of silent disengagement, where the most talented stop trying, lose trust, and eventually leave. The quality of dialogue collapses, creativity becomes a liability, and excellence is perceived as an affront to the status quo of mediocrity. According to Gallup (2022), 70% of employees who leave their jobs do so due to toxic culture rather than compensation. Innovation does not die because ideas are lacking, but because ideas are considered dangerous when they do not originate from the "right" circles. Amy Edmondson, in her theory of psychological safety, explains that teams without a sense of expressive freedom avoid risk and fall into collective silence. This silence is not merely the absence of dissent - it is the absence of meaning. These organisations lose, over time, their reputation, internal coherence, and competitiveness, as the erosion of trust acts corrosively and, ultimately, irreversibly.

The way out of this jungle is not through bureaucratic reforms, but through the restoration of clarity and moral truth. An organisation must examine itself with honesty: who is rewarded, who is silenced, and why? Evaluation based on transparency, the strengthening of psychological safety, and leadership that protects value rather than suppresses it, are the only path to healthy organisational life. As Chris Argyris warns in his work on double-loop learning, organisations that refuse to confront their systemic dysfunctions become trapped in self-destructive cycles.

The greatest threat is not failure, but success that cannot be tolerated. And as long as excellence is punished rather than recognised, collapse is not a possibility, it is merely a matter of time.

Selected Bibliography

1. Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review.

2. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.

3. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations.

4. Kübler-Ross, E. (1973). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan (particularly chapters adapted to organisational contexts).

5. Manz, C. C., & Sims, H. P. (1993). Business Without Bosses: How Self-Managing Teams are Building High-Performing Companies. Wiley.

6. Pfeffer, J. (1992). Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organisations. Harvard Business School Press.