The Cost of Organisational Scarcity: How crab mentality drives good people out

Picture a pot of water beginning to boil, crowded with crabs.

One small crab finds the wall and begins to climb. It slips, steadies itself and reaches desperately towards the rim. For a moment, escape feels possible.

Then a claw closes around its leg from inside the pot.

The crab is dragged back into the heat and the crush below.

Another tries. It is pulled down too. Soon, nobody climbs. Defeated, the crabs remain still.

The problem is not the crab trying to climb to safety. The problem is the pot they are all trapped in. The tragedy is not that escape was impossible. It is that survival taught the crabs to see another’s progress as their own loss, leaving no one better off.

This dynamic can emerge inside our organisations too.

The crabs-in-a-pot story is best understood as a metaphor, rather than a scientific claim about crab behaviour. However, “crab mentality” has been studied as a human workplace phenomenon. In a 2019 study of healthcare workers, Gizem Zevde Aydın and Gülpembe Oğuzhan identified jealousy, egocentrism and perceived unfairness as key drivers with negative effects on stress, teamwork and productivity. Separate experiments by psychologist Daniel V. Meegan identified “zero-sum bias”: an adjacent phenomenon where people interpret another person’s gain as their own loss even when the available rewards are not actually limited.

Surviving the Starvation Cycle

Organisations doing meaningful work are often born from exclusion, injustice and institutional failure. They survive through years of unstable funding, under-recognition and competition for limited resources. Their caution is understandable because it has been shaped by real experience.

In their 2022 report, the Centre for Social Impact and Social Ventures Australia found that indirect operating costs averaged 33 per cent of not-for-profit expenditure, while funding agreements typically covered only 10 to 20 per cent. The researchers warn the resulting pressure creates a “non-profit starvation cycle,” in which organisations understate essential costs to secure funding and are then left without the infrastructure required to operate sustainably.

This scarcity begins to shape how success is understood. Recognition feels finite. Relationships become organisational property. Instead of seeing a worker’s growing reputation as shared success, the organisation experiences it as a loss of control. The worker’s external connections are welcomed when they bring opportunities inward, but viewed with suspicion when they also strengthen the individual.

The Quietly Uninvited

A staff member is invited personally to speak at a professional event. When leadership becomes aware of it, the organisation moves to claim the opportunity as its own. Because the topic overlaps with the company’s work, leadership argues that it should control the engagement: who speaks, how the contact is made and suggests another speaker is more suitable. The invitation is withdrawn.

The organisation loses the speaking opportunity. Soon afterwards, it also loses the employee, along with the knowledge, credibility and professional relationships they carried.

Organisational economist Ingrid Haegele describes a related behaviour as “talent hoarding”—when managers restrict employees’ access to opportunities because losing a strong performer could disadvantage their own team. In her 2021 study, Talent Hoarding in Organizations, Haegele found that three-quarters of managers reported engaging in talent hoarding.

Silencing the Best Advocate

A worker attends a professional networking event in their own time and at their own expense. When asked about their work they speak enthusiastically about their project. Later, they are told that discussing work outside of work time was inappropriate. They are expected to promote the project, strengthen the organisation’s reputation and create connections, but only in conversations the organisation can oversee.

In response, the worker stops speaking freely. Word-of-mouth referrals, spontaneous introductions and unexpected opportunities begin to disappear. The organisation has silenced one of its best advocates.

In their Harvard Business Review article, Can Your Employees Really Speak Freely?, James R. Detert and Ethan Burris draw on research showing that fear of workplace consequences can lead employees to withhold valuable ideas, concerns and information from the very organisations that need them

Who Gets to Be Seen?

A worker identifies the need for specialist training, develops it and becomes its primary facilitator. When the training is publicly announced, their contribution is omitted. Leadership frames individual recognition as a distraction from the project and a risk to organisational priorities.

The message is unmistakable: You may make the organisation visible, provided the work does not make you visible too.

Recognition is not just symbolic. Gallup’s longitudinal analysis of nearly 3,500 employees found that those who received high-quality recognition were 45 per cent less likely to have left their organisation two years later and 65 per cent less likely to be actively seeking or watching for another job.

Understanding Scarcity, Marginalisation and Lateral Violence

Groups that experience marginalisation are not immune from reproducing harmful power dynamics within their own organisations. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Social Justice Report 2011 examines lateral violence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as a consequence of colonisation, oppression and control. The report also acknowledges that formal research in this area remains limited.

(Note: While researching this article, I found that discussions of lateral violence were largely situated within racialised contexts. This led me to wonder how often similar harm within other marginalised groups and organisations is treated as an isolated problem, rather than understood in the context of scarcity, exclusion and power.)

Understanding the conditions behind these dynamics does not make the behaviour acceptable, though it can help us understand how to tackle it.

When people have repeatedly been denied resources, authority and recognition, it can become difficult to trust that there will ever be enough to share. Their opportunity can feel like something taken from the collective. Lateral violence can hide inside respectable language about accountability, collective ownership, reputational risk and protecting the organisation. Of course, organisations need confidentiality, role clarity and responsible decision-making. But when rules are selectively used to contain employees, so-called organisational “boundaries” can be weaponised as a covert way of pulling them back into the pot.

Could This Be Happening in Our Organisation?

These conditions are rarely created deliberately. They emerge through pressure, fear and scarcity, then become visible in ordinary decisions: external invitations turn into disputes about ownership, staff are encouraged to network but questioned when contacts approach them directly, individual contributors are omitted from public recognition, and senior leaders build profiles freely while others face tighter rules.

The consequences are shocking. In their MIT Sloan Management Review study, Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation, Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig analysed attrition data alongside more than 1.4 million employee reviews. They found that a toxic organisational culture was 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting turnover. Although the research focused on large US employers, its broader finding is clear: workplace culture has a massive impact on staff retention.

The key question is who is trusted to use their judgement, who must seek permission, and what happens when someone’s credibility begins to extend beyond the organisation. Answering that honestly is the first step towards restoring recognition and rebuilding trust.

The Cost of Taking Over

Staff do not remain in organisations forever. They change roles, take on caring responsibilities, build businesses, return to study or outgrow what a position can offer. That progression should reflect an organisation’s success in developing them. Trying to delay departure by restricting recognition or controlling professional relationships comes at a cost: weaker networks, missed opportunities and reduced initiative.

Former employees leave with their expertise, reputation and connections. Organisations that share opportunities, give proper credit and support growth may continue to benefit through referrals, partnerships and advocacy long after someone leaves. Those focused on retaining ownership may keep the contact lists and intellectual property while losing the goodwill and relationships that made them valuable.

This is supported by research. In a 2022 study, Alison M. Dachner and Erin E. Makarius identified former employees as valuable sources of referrals, knowledge-sharing, brand advocacy and returning “boomerang” hires. In their Harvard Business Review article, Turn Departing Employees into Loyal Alumni, they argue that departure should not be treated as the end of the relationship, and that thoughtful offboarding can create long-term value for both organisations and their former employees.

Hire people you trust and allow them to use their judgement.

Experienced employees generally understand confidentiality, professional boundaries and the difference between sharing their expertise and formally representing an organisation. If leaders do not trust them to make those distinctions, the issue may lie in recruitment, supervision or organisational culture.. not in the existence of professional relationships outside the workplace.

Give staff room to develop professional identities and connections that can survive role changes and departures. Credit people openly and remain connected after they leave. There is enough expertise to share, enough recognition to distribute and more than enough work to be done. Ultimately, when someone becomes respected beyond the workplace, see it for what it is: evidence that your organisation attracts and supports credible people.

Research on informal workplace networks supports taking these relationships seriously. A 2021 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology found that employees’ social connections can influence organisational strategy and performance, while a 2017 study published in the Journal of Business Research linked informal professional interactions with greater knowledge-sharing and innovation. These networks benefit organisations by helping information move faster, strengthening collaboration, generating new ideas and creating opportunities across teams and sectors.

Build a Better Future Together

Perhaps the deeper work is to challenge what we believe we own.

With honest self-reflection, organisations can move away from ownership and towards stewardship.

The goal is not to become the organisation with the most people trapped inside it. It is to create an ecosystem where people become capable, connected and confident enough to climb beyond the pot—and still choose to reach back and help others succeed.

— Written by Anastasia Sabatino and co-authored by Dom Pezzutto. At No Simple People, we help organisations and individuals to rebuild trust, strengthen culture and create healthier ways of working.