Publish and Perish? Hyper-Competitive Culture, Performance and Well-being in Academia

Do aggressive, hyper-competitive workplace cultures drive success, or undermine it? Although such cultures appear across a wide range of industries, from tech and consulting to academia, their link to workplace performance remains largely unexamined. Drawing on survey and archival data from over 1,000 faculty and staff across five European business schools, the authors measure individual perceptions of masculinity contest culture (MCC) and construct novel indicators of shared beliefs at the reference group level. They find that MCC is consistently associated with lower employee well-being and higher turnover intentions. Critically, they find no positive associations with academics' publication rates or citation impact, and instead observe reduced overall research output. Both men and women show negative associations between MCC, well-being and productivity, with no advantages even for star performers. However, women experience additional citation penalties, indicating that MCC may exacerbate gender disparities in how research is evaluated. These findings challenge common assumptions that aggressively competitive cultures are necessary for research excellence.