Is Ambition in the Workplace a Good Thing?

Ambition in the workplace can be a good thing, because it is generally ambition that drives you to perform better. When you want to achieve career success, you may be prepared to go beyond what is expected of you, so that, hopefully, your efforts will be recognised by your superiors and you will be rewarded with a promotion. The positive side of ambition is wanting to get ahead and being prepared to work hard for it. However, there can also be a negative side if your ambition exceeds your ability and you decide to do everything possible to get ahead.

If you are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve career success, you are likely to get on the wrong side of the people you work with. If your ambition leads you to steal other people's ideas and take credit for work that you haven't actually done, you will most probably be found out sooner or later. Clearly, even if you are promoted it is going to be difficult to get your colleagues on board if they have very little respect for you. Ruthless ambition is therefore not a good thing and although it may help you obtain a promotion or two, it would be better to rely on ability and hard work.

This may be difficult if you're not particularly talented at the job you have been employed to do and would prefer to shirk your responsibilities and get other people to complete tasks that you should be doing. If your ambitious, but lazy and not very astute, you may become depressed and annoyed at your lack of career success. It therefore might be worth scaling back your career goals if there is very little chance of you achieving them, especially if your ambition is not enough to motivate you to try harder.

It is when you are highly ambitious without necessarily having the goods to back up your ambition that you may decide to trample upon other people to get wherever you want to go. You may be so preoccupied with furthering your career that you will do whatever it takes to achieve your goals. This might be good for you, but not for everyone else. It can be extremely frustrating to see someone who has very little aptitude for a job get ahead just because he is good at sucking up to the boss and getting on the right side of important people, but this seems to happen all too frequently.

A certain degree of ambition is good if you have a career that you wish to pursue and achieve success in, but there is more to life than work. You shouldn't allow ambition to consume your life, especially if it means you end up abandoning your principles and doing whatever you can to succeed without considering the consequences for other people. You cannot rely on ambition alone when hard work and perseverance are also what is required.