I'd like to talk about my colleague Chidi, who works with me at an architecture firm in Abuja. We joined the company in the same month about three years ago, so I suppose I've been his main rival since day one.
He's competitive about absolutely everything. At work, it's things you'd expect: who finishes drawings first, whose design the client chooses, who gets mentioned in the team meeting. But it goes much further. He keeps track of how many steps he walks each day and compares it with everyone in the office. When we play table tennis at lunchtime, he refuses to stop until he's won at least once. He even tried to turn the office charity bake sale into a contest about whose cake sold out quickest.
So is it a good thing? I'd say mostly yes, with a few warnings. On the positive side, he pushes the whole team. When he stays late to improve a design, the rest of us tend to raise our standards as well, and I've definitely become a better architect partly because I didn't want him to beat me. He also takes losing quite well, surprisingly; he'll congratulate you and then ask how you did it, so he can learn.
On the other hand, it can be exhausting. Not everyone enjoys turning lunch into a tournament, and one of our newer colleagues felt a bit intimidated by him at first. I think competitiveness is healthy as long as it's aimed at getting better rather than making others look worse. Chidi is mostly on the right side of that line, but sometimes he needs reminding that a bake sale isn't the Olympics.