This just moves the competitive boundary between teams, rather than individuals. It's not unheard of teams that compete and sabotage each other to make their project the most important and impactful.
Then switch deparmental for organisation-wide, then that for nation-wide, then that for world-wide.
For example, you might have a legacy team whose future headcount growth is negatively impacted by a new team. Whether because this new team is automating tasks of the legacy team, or building a product that will cannibalize sales.
From the perspective of the company, the legacy team should embrace the future and allow themselves to be creatively destroyed.
But in reality, you have some leaders who do not want to give up power and will try to hold on, optimizing for personal incentives.
If somehow the people in the old team get into their heads the idea that organisation-wide success stands in conflict with their security, then you have a problem.
But the problem is with management, not the people on the teams.
Edit: in general, it's a common disease in companies to associate people with teams rather than the organisation. People don't become useless because their previous roles are obsoleted. Those are still valuable people and sure, there's a cost to retraining them, but the cost to letting them go (in terms of what it teaches the rest of your employees) is so much greater. (Though unfortunately harder to measure.)
Let the team measure themselves, bit give them a clear mandate and shared purpose.
When teams are incomparable, no such rivalry can make sense.
That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.
> That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.
Teams have lifecycles too, so there are dynamics of team selection and teammate selection that can help with those problems.