My submission is, that a competitive team, which knows to work collaboratively will give the best output. A smart leader is one who finds ways to promote healthy competition within the team; ensures that ideas are shared, achievements are celebrated and there is collective responsibility for failure. Collaboration and competition need to co-exist because one without the other is never the sustainable way to be. Some may feel that the competitive streak in a team may result in alienating the weak members. But I believe that it is the competitive spirit in a collaborative environment that gives the weaker teammates an opportunity to better themselves. It provides them a chance to learn from others and motivates them to self-improve.

Great teams are made up of people who compete well, respect each other’s’ views and contribute equally. They understand that for excellence to become a habit, you need to practise it over and over until it becomes second nature. Success comes from each member having a distinctive yet complementary role. The best teams are those which combine individual drive with the understanding of the importance and power of the team.

A great leader creates a great team and it is the responsibility of a leader to ensure a healthy balance of collaboration and competition within his team. Many of us may think that collaboration and competition cannot exits together, but the fact is, collaboration and competition nurture each other. Competition encourages people to give their best and collaboration encourages the team to put everyone’s talent to the best use.

Both competition and collaboration have their advantages, but one of them takes over the other. While competition ensures that only the toughest of competitors are left and creates an environment that may result in better outcomes, collaboration instills a habit of teamwork in us and allows us to think more open-mindedly. 

Moreover, competition may have some negative psychological effect as peer pressure may cause stress and depression. Collaboration, on the other hand, results in reduced stress and helps nurture curiosity and share different perspectives, which results in innovative ideas.

An instance of my life in which collaboration helped me achieve my goal was when I was a part of a social project and was working in a team of 5. Instead of doing our own work and sharing results in the end, we decided to go about it collaboratively. We divided responsibilities, and through sharing our ideas, we were able to achieve our goal more efficiently and with better quality, than we would have if we had worked individually.

Once collaboration is in place, people are much more trusting of each other, more willing to stretch themselves and more likely to create amazing results.

The opposite happens when competition starts showing up. People hoard systems, information and support staff. They’re less likely to share all kinds of resources — physical and intellectual. Those who see solutions for problems don’t share them until they can be sure they’ll get the credit. It’s impossible to get to the best ideas when people refuse to share and work through thinking together.When competition is in play, people don’t trust each other enough to authentically create stretch goals that will enable everyone to grow beyond where they are now.If you sincerely want a group of people to be high-performing together, you don’t want to create a culture of internal competition within the team.That being said, I have seen other organizations who use healthy competition between teams to produce cutting-edge ideas. In these cases, two or three teams were charged with doing the exact same thing. They knew the other teams existed, but these teams didn’t share resources (budget, people or ideas) across the groups. Each team wanted to get to the end result on its own to be the winner.This kind of competition between teams can create an intensity that generates powerful results for an organization. When you do this, you need to be transparent, and you want to clearly establish that they’re all working toward the same goal that will ultimately benefit the whole company and everyone in it. It’s also a good idea to let people know ahead of time that those teams will be shuffled up into new groups when the competition is over and then everyone will be expected to share best practices with each other.Ultimately, you want to create a workplace culture where people freely share information, opinions and perspectives. The best way to achieve that is through building trust and emphasizing collaboration, not competition.

An instance from my personal experiences throwing light on the same would date back to last year when we were given a project on disaster management. I was to be frank struggling with it and almost a fortnight went in lieu of not finding any legitimate resources regarding the mentioned. It was to my fortune that I got a chance to speak to a junior research intern working directly under a civil servant at the planning commission of India more commonly known as the NITI Ayog. After speaking to her it is hard not to say that I gained such deep and tactful insight on the internal schemes of how disaster management in India actually works, ranging from the cellular degree to the portfolios in the cabinet. Collaborating with the research scholar opened my mind to arenas of progress as she even provided me with analytics and immediate mitigation strategies that our country follows and how the officials are always on their toes. 

That specific collaboration reflects how working together produces better and convalescent end results than working on our own while we create more problems than we resolve.

 In a world with unlimited funding, collaboration is a the way to go with no issues whatsoever. However, as we live in a world where funding is limited, it is necessary to be choosy, and that means you need to spend the money on the best people to increase the odds of getting the best results. As such, encouraging people to show that they have what it takes is important, which means that collaboration might not always be the way to go.

It is well known that competitions, especially ones with challenging conditions, tend to bring out the worst in the competitors. It encourages people to cheat, stow away any new ideas just because it might not be relevant and overall discourages many from ever enjoying what they do.  To do well in such an environment, one would have to know how to handle such pressure well, but I don't believe that handling the pressure that comes along with competitions should be a requirement for good scientists. A good scientist can be any person with a hunger to know more about the universe and who is willing to devote their time to the pursuit of science.

Competitive environments are also mostly results-driven and only reward those who get those results, while penalising the people who make too many mistakes. I believe this directly contradicts the scientific method, in which we conduct experiments and often fail, we fail so we can better understand why we failed and improve. In a competitive environment, such a process would be punished, which would greatly hinder scientific progress.

An instance from my life where collaboration helped me would be throughout this lockdown. In these times, I have been able to improve my understanding of concepts and prepare for tests far more thoroughly by collaborating with my classmates. We clear each other's doubts and because we have alternating strong subjects, whenever one of us has problems with grasping a concept or has trouble remembering it, we overcome it by sharing different metaphors, ways and routes of learning or remembering said concept. Because of this collaboration, not only have we helped each other improve in our studies, we feel more confident in our knowledge of these subjects. 

Collaboration, on the other hand, is all about progressing as a whole. There is no winner unless the entire group crosses the finish line together.

While a competitive work environment drives results, the way it drives them is by being fear-driven, overworked, and individualistic. Collaborative environments also drive results, but by way of positivity, teamwork, and creativity.

The environment generated by pure competition is often a vicious and negative cycle.

Through personal experience, I am of the opinion that a holistic mix of both, competition and collaboration are required to generate an overall better workspace; not only in the field of science but elsewhere as well.

Studies show that people are generally more productive under pressure, however work better, not as individuals but when in a group. Having said that, I'd like to use the example of a friend of mine. He has a vast variety if interests ranging from debating to programming, and, last year his school had recommended his name for two competitions clashing on the same date; a debate and a coding competition. He, as a person prefers debates and oratory in general over "monotonous" tasks such as programming as those types of competitions generally allow more room for creative expression, however, he wasn't given a choice and was told to go for the programming competition because he was more likely to win that. The above example goes to illustrate my point that a competition based environment is a lot more goal oriented, creating a more negative surrounding, lacking creative expression and personal opinion.

However, a collaboration based surrounding foes have it's own shortcomings as well. The most prominent being; difference of opinion. For example, last year on Science Day, there was an activity organised within the school related to robotics, where students were segregated into teams of 4. We, as a team, had a plan ready for what we wanted to do. But a member of the team had a different idea and this led to, said person, not working with the rest of the team, leading to us not being able to execute either plan.

In my opinion, an ideal work environment should have room for creative thinking, personal opinion and free thinking whilst having healthy competition.

While the idea of mutually beneficial competition, or 'co-opetition' has been recently popularised, one can argue that by its very nature, competition is rarely accepted by choice and is seldom friendly. It pits us against the 'other' and appeals to our primal instincts to win by any means necessary - particularly if the stakes are high enough. While there may be rules to keep competition fair, there will almost always be those who push the boundaries of what is deemed fair and acceptable behaviour. To survive in competition, this ultimately forces others to similarly test these boundaries, pushing them ever outwards, resulting in a destructive race that seldom benefits all parties.On the other hand, collaboration, by its very nature, demands mutual co-operation to benefit all parties involved. We all become part of a single network, where damaging a single node would also harm ourselves. As such, we seek to improve not only ourselves but others too. It engenders trust, further encourages the sharing of knowledge and creates an environment where collective intelligence can be fostered to address some of the more challenging problems that we face. The sharing of ideas is also more conducive to creativity, innovation, adaptability and speed of progress.As such, given a choice of one or the other, it would likely be wiser to lean towards collaboration rather than competition.
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Collaboration, on the other hand, is all about progressing as a whole. There is no winner unless the entire group crosses the finish line together.

In that light, collaboration is bigger than one person. It’s a culture. Any staff member, department, or organization that wants to prioritize collaboration over competition needs to weave it into the very fabric of who they are.

I experienced this when I was in class 9 when I took part in a competition in which I enrolled as an individual initially but preparing for it I got very jumbled up and then at last I asked my classmates whether they wanted to take part in the competition with me as a team and then we made a group of five and we finished our work within a week and even better than I could have done individual so this taught me a lesson that when we are in competition we do not get many ideas and we become very unorganized but in a collaboration we can get more and more ideas which help us to get a very refined and effective idea and it becomes easier for everyone member to do their part and this combined effort is always fruitful and helps enhance our coordination and relations with our team 

As for collaborative environments, he writes that individuals:

 While a competitive work environment drives results, the way it drives them is by being fear-driven, overworked, and individualistic. Collaborative environments also drive results, but by way of positivity, teamwork, and creativity.

Competition encourages people to work harder, to work better, to deliver more efficient products. Most of the time, whoever does it best/fastest, is rewarded the most. This is also true in science, where whoever makes the first discovery is the one that will get the much needed grants and their publications. On the other hand, the more minds working on the same issues, the more likely there will be faster results by those people. So collaboration is what one could consider a good thing for scientific progress.

People often get faced with ultimatums in life. Science, or commerce? Buying an iPhone or an Android when you need a phone? To eat this food, or something else tonight? All of these are choices many people are faced with, however, the paths relating to collaboration and competition, are not completely ultimatums in themselves, they are in a class of their own.

What is science about? Science is the culmination of great minds contributing together to reach a successful and beneficial conclusion on topics which can make our day to day life better, as well as bettering the big picture stuff too, right? Well, for us to get said results, we need to set an environment and a nature suitable for prospering this. That is when the debate between competition and collaboration comes into play. Should we set an environment based on team skills, or individualistic talent?
I find that if a person is sociable and amiable, or weak at something, it helps to put them in a collaborative environment(where they can work well with others and boost them as well as themselves; or if they are weak, they can be uplifted and have the ability to use the experience and help of others around them in enhancing their skills), whereas if they are really strong at something or just a bit introverted, putting them in an individual team is more beneficial(if they are extremely proficient at it, they can work alone to not be burdened down, but if they are willing to work with others, then it is better for the weak members of the prospect team; and if they are introverted, they’ll work better alone, since they shouldn’t be ^forced^ to do something they aren’t comfortable with). Other than basing the choice on the personalities and the minds of the persons, there is not much we can do.
On a personal note, I see myself as a student with team qualities, but with sort of subpar leadership skills. I have not encountered many such challenges wherein I was made to choose between either of these(due to the introverted nature I possessed when I was younger), but if asked, I assume I would base it on the nature and minds of the people I am to be working with/against.