My point was that no, I don't think stack ranking provides a greater impetus to backstabbing your coworkers than this sort of vague compensation model. In fact, I think a continuous model may lead to more backstabbing than exists now.
Currently, I go into a bucket - let's say I'm a two, for instance - and all the twos get the same compensation. Can I backstab somebody so that I get a two and they get a three? Maybe.
But if we remove the buckets and we have some continuity, where now if my coworker outperformed me and we were both twos... now this coworker just straight up outperformed me. I'm more inclined to want to stab that person in the back so that I'm better, since being almost as good isn't valuable anymore.
Now, it's possible that we'll end up with stack ranking all over again. The previous compensation before the current stack ranking system put you in a bucket from 5-1 where 5 was good and 1 was bad. So... it turns out that we don't change this very much even when we do change things.
In the world outside of stack ranking, you aren't winning/losing against your peers, you are being paid what you are worth. Backstabbing somebody else does not change your worth, it just makes them less valuable than you. So your salary does not change, theirs just goes down.
Far more importantly, I have spent my 25 year career in non-stack ranked companies, and I have never seen the behavior you describe. Yet just about everyone at stack ranked companies report back stabbing behavior. I think empiricism wins over speculation.
It doesn't really matter. Most of the time you don't know which bucket you're going to end up in, so constant back stabbing is the modus operandi to stay on top. I'm more curious about the absence of the formal review cycle in the new model.
I'm saying that: there is a fixed bonus pool for employees. All of this bonus pool will be allocated. Said bonus pool will be allocated in a merit-based way such that those who are deemed "better" get more than those who are deemed "worse".
So yes, employees will indeed be sorted from 'best' to 'worst' by some metric. This is pretty much true of every performance-based evaluation system, no?
Removing the "stack ranking" system refers to removing the 20%/70%/10% buckets from 1-5 that we currently sort into, not the fact that we're doing a merit-based reward.
Thus my point remains: if our review system is a problem (and certainly a great many people seem to think that it is) then this seems like a tweak on the system, not an overhaul. What we're being evaluated on and who is doing the evaluating is much more important than whether we're explicitly "stack ranked" into buckets or not.
Currently, I go into a bucket - let's say I'm a two, for instance - and all the twos get the same compensation. Can I backstab somebody so that I get a two and they get a three? Maybe.
But if we remove the buckets and we have some continuity, where now if my coworker outperformed me and we were both twos... now this coworker just straight up outperformed me. I'm more inclined to want to stab that person in the back so that I'm better, since being almost as good isn't valuable anymore.
Now, it's possible that we'll end up with stack ranking all over again. The previous compensation before the current stack ranking system put you in a bucket from 5-1 where 5 was good and 1 was bad. So... it turns out that we don't change this very much even when we do change things.