How Competition Makes Workplace Silos Worse (And How to Fix It)

by Chad Davis | Team Building Tips

Picture this: Your company just wrapped up its annual departmental challenge—a cooking competition designed to foster teamwork and boost morale.

The marketing team huddled in one corner, perfecting their gourmet sliders. The engineering team calculated the precise measurements for their soufflé. The sales team’s enthusiastic cheers echoed as they plated their pasta creation. Everyone had fun. Energy levels were high.

But did anything fundamentally change in how these teams work together day-to-day?

Probably not. In fact, you might have inadvertently reinforced the very silos you were trying to break down.

Why Teams Get Siloed—And How Competition Makes it Worse

Your marketing director storms out of a meeting with engineering—again. “They never listen to what the customer wants!” Meanwhile, the engineering team complains that marketing makes promises they can’t deliver. Despite three team building events this year, the silos remain as strong as ever.

Sound familiar? These problems aren’t specific to marketers and engineers—it happens in any organization with multiple teams.

Teams get siloed for three key reasons, and traditional competition often makes these worse:

1. Tribal Psychology: Humans naturally form tight-knit groups with strong identities. Competition intensifies this tribal mentality, strengthening in-group bonds while creating distance from other teams.
2. Resource Protection: Departments hoard information and resources to maintain control and status. Competitive activities reinforce this by rewarding teams that keep their “competitive advantages” to themselves.
3. Different Goals and Metrics: When teams are measured differently, they prioritize their own objectives over organizational success. Competition emphasizes these separate goals rather than creating shared ones.

Understanding this psychology matters:

According to Deloitte research, siloed organizations often see reduced employee satisfaction, with only 61% of workers feeling their organization cares about their well-being, and face challenges in fostering innovation due to limited collaboration. Meanwhile, businesses that break down departmental barriers can enhance performance, with digitally mature organizations (per MIT research cited by Deloitte) achieving up to 25% higher profits compared to less integrated competitors.

In other words, it literally pays to break down those silos!

In the following sections, we’ll show you how to transform standard competitive activities into powerful silo-breaking tools that your employees will thank you for—because they’ll actually enjoy them.

How Competition Actually Reinforces Silos (With 3 Popular Team Building Games As Examples)

Many common team building activities create the opposite of their intended effect. Rather than get everyone to come together as a single team, it pits people against each other, making the silos only stronger.

To explain our logic, check out these three popular team building games that can actually strengthen workplace divisions:

1. Cooking Competitions

It’s like bringing the experience of TV cooking competitions into your office! Sounds like a blast, right?

But here’s what teams do in your typical cooking challenge:

• Protect their workspace and ingredients
• Guard their “recipes for success”
• Focus exclusively on their team’s performance
• Celebrate their victory in isolation

Sound familiar?

These competitions unwittingly mirror how departments behave in siloed organizations. Where information, resources, and recognition remain trapped within team boundaries.

If the goal at the end of the day is team building, a cooking competition—while fun—is only going to reinforce the wrong ideas.

2. Traditional Escape Rooms

Escape rooms have exploded in popularity over the last decade, eventually making their way to the office—but how do they hold up as team building games?

In standard escape room setups, teams are literally placed in separate rooms, racing against other teams without seeing each other’s progress. Success or failure happens in isolation—there’s no way for teams to share insights or resources. And when a team gets stuck on a puzzle, do they have incentive to reach out to another team? No—helping would hurt their competitive standing.

This mirrors siloed workplace culture, where departments withhold information that could benefit the organization.

3. Departmental Sports Competitions

The classic sales vs. marketing softball game or engineering vs. finance volleyball match reinforces existing organizational divides. These activities:

• Strengthen bonds within already-established teams
• Create competition between departments that should collaborate
• Emphasize winning over finding ways to work together
• Build team pride at the expense of organizational unity

These activities feel good in the moment but leave organizational silos firmly intact—or even stronger than before.

Plus, while we enjoy a good sporting event as much as anyone else, you have to consider that team building should include everyone. Not everyone in the office can perform at the same fitness level. An intense sports competition could create an uncomfortable situation for the elderly or those needing accommodations.

How to Redesign Competition to So That it Doesn’t Reinforce Silos

The good news? Competition itself isn’t the problem.

With smart design, competitive activities can break down silos rather than reinforce them.

Here’s how to transform competitive team building:

1. Make Teams Need Each Other

• Traditional approach: Teams operate independently from start to finish.
• Silo-breaking approach: Design competitions where teams must exchange resources, information, or team members to succeed.

Example: In a redesigned cooking competition, each team prepares one component of a meal that must ultimately work together. The engineering team’s sauce needs to complement marketing’s main dish, while finance’s dessert must balance the overall meal experience.

2. Start Separate, Finish Together

• Traditional approach: Teams compete in parallel with no interaction.
• Silo-breaking approach: Begin with separate team challenges, then progressively integrate teams or their work products.

Example: An escape room experience where teams start in separate rooms but must eventually join forces to solve the final puzzle—bringing their separate clues together.

3. Reward Helping Others

• Traditional approach: Winning is the only rewarded outcome.
• Silo-breaking approach: Create explicit rewards for helping others, both inside and outside the organization.

Example: Charity-based team building events like Build-a-Bike ® fundamentally change the competition dynamic. Teams earn points by completing challenges, but the real reward comes from working together to build bicycles for underprivileged children. This creates a powerful dual purpose:

1. Teams compete to earn parts and tools through mini-challenges
2. But they must share resources and knowledge to successfully complete high-quality bikes

When a marketing team figures out a tricky assembly step, they’re motivated to share that knowledge with the finance team—not just to help kids, but because the shared mission creates a natural culture of collaboration that carries back to the workplace.

These events transform “winning” from beating other departments to collectively creating something meaningful, breaking down silos while building stronger communities.

4. Let Teams See Each Other Work

• Traditional approach: Teams have no visibility into other teams’ work processes.
• Silo-breaking approach: Create transparent environments where teams can observe and learn from each other’s approaches.

Example: A team challenge where workstations are visible to all, with periodic opportunities to observe other teams’ techniques or strategies.

Case Study: My Rich Uncle Escape Room

Let’s see these silo-breaking principles in action through our most popular team building escape room experience:

• The challenge: Most traditional escape rooms fit only a few people and are designed for teams to compete in isolation—often with frustrating results when teams fail to escape in time.
• Our silo-breaking solution: My Rich Uncle Escape Room completely reimagines the escape room concept for true team building.

How It Works

In this unique experience, your rich Great Uncle, Roland N. Cashe, has locked his fortune in a briefcase. Teams must prove they’re the true heir by unlocking the combination.

We divide large groups into teams of 5-7 people, but here’s where our design breaks down silos:

• Shared Resources: Each team receives identical kits containing Uncle Roland’s personal documents with hidden clues
• Collaborative Environment: Teams work in the same room, creating natural opportunities for cross-team interaction
• Guided Competition: Our instructors coach teams and provide hints, ensuring all teams finish at roughly the same time
• Progressive Success: Teams get increasingly excited as they discover each digit of the six-digit combination

The Results

The event creates a perfect balance of healthy competition and collaboration. The first-place team unlocks their briefcase, while remaining teams are just seconds away from finishing—creating both winners and a collective sense of accomplishment.

Conclusion: Competition That Connects

Next time you design a competitive team building activity, ask yourself: “Will this experience reinforce existing silos, or help break them down?” With the principles outlined here, you can create competitions that don’t just entertain—they actually improve how teams work together.

Your clients want more than just fun experiences—they need real organizational improvement. By rethinking competition, you can deliver both.