Game On: An Exploration of Perceived Environmental Competitiveness, Its Antecedents, and Its Effects on Performance

Perceived environmental competitiveness is the degree to which people view situations and the people within them as being competitive. It broadly describes an individual’s subjective perceptions of competition in their surrounding environment without limiting the source of those perceptions to situational aspects, individual traits, or developed relationships. There has been very little research on perceived environmental competitiveness at work, with the limited work focusing on how perceived environmental competitiveness positively impacts performance via performance-approach goals and negatively impacts performance via performance-avoidance goals. This dissertation builds on prior theoretical and empirical work on perceived environmental competitiveness to identify and test two antecedents—winning orientation and negatively interdependent rewards. Furthermore, this study probes deeper into the perceived environmental competitiveness-performance relationship by suggesting dual mediating pathways of challenge appraisal and threat appraisal moderated by core self-evaluation. Findings of a two-wave employee sample indicate that negatively interdependent rewards is positively related to perceived environmental competitiveness. Further, perceived environmental competitiveness may be appraised as a challenge or a threat, but the appraisal was not influenced by an individual’s core self-evaluation.

Many thanks to Blythe’s dissertation committee:

• Committee Chair – Mary Mawritz – Associate Professor – Drexel University • Committee Member Lauren D’Innocenzo - Assistant Professor- Drexel University • Committee Member: Jeffrey Greenhaus - Professor Emeritus – Drexel University • Committee Member: Daniel Tzabbar - Associate Professor – Drexel University • Committee Member: Gavin Kilduff - Associate Professor – New York University