You’ve likely heard the metaphor: if you put one crab in an open bucket, it will climb out. But put a group of crabs together, and none will escape. Why? Because every time a crab tries, the other crabs will actively pull it back down.

This isn’t just a story; this behavior is seen with live crabs. This is the crab bucket effect, a powerful illustration of crab mentality.

In the workplace, this phenomenon is a cultural poison that erodes morale, sabotages high performers, and stalls growth.

Over the years of coaching leaders, I’ve learned that crab mentality doesn’t thrive because people are inherently malicious; it thrives because leaders haven’t built a culture of trust and psychological safety.

You cannot fix toxic behaviors without transforming the mindset behind them. This guide will show you how to recognize and overcome the crab mentality on your team using the principles of Intelligent Leadership.

We’ll explore how to build a culture where everyone can rise together.

What Is Crab Mentality and Why Does It Thrive?

In essence, crab mentality is the tendency to undermine people who are trying to get ahead. At work, crab mentality exists as a toxic behavior pattern driven by envy, insecurity, and a scarcity mindset.

This is a troubling aspect of human behavior, where competitiveness and a negative reaction to the achievements of others take root.

People tend to react negatively when they perceive someone else’s gains as a threat to their own status or opportunities.

This interesting phenomenon often appears when one team member begins to excel. Whether through praise, innovation, or a promotion, their progress can make others feel threatened.

This can lead them to subtly or overtly undermine that person’s success, as they may view someone else’s gains as their own personal loss. It’s an unfortunate reality in many organizations.

Read more: Why Comparing Yourself to Others Derails Your Leadership Development

The Psychology Behind the Pull-Down Effect

Internal Mechanisms

Envy often arises when we compare our journey to someone else’s, leading to self-evaluation and perceiving a threat to our own status or self-worth. This reaction is frequently based on an incorrect belief that another person’s achievements diminish our own value.

In high-pressure environments, this social comparison turns toxic. The sight of people’s progress is perceived as a danger, leading to negative behaviors designed to halt other people’s progress.

These cognitive biases are a key driver of the crab mentality. Individuals may mistakenly view others’ progress as a threat rather than an opportunity for growth, reinforcing this destructive mindset.

Even dedicated professionals can fall into this mindset in certain situations, especially when they feel overlooked, excluded from decisions, or lacking a clear path for advancement. Feeling left behind can trigger negative behaviors like gossip or sabotage.

External Consequences

The American Psychological Association notes these feelings often lead to incivility or passive-aggressive behavior that poisons the team dynamic.

Most people feel a pang of discomfort when someone close to them gets ahead. Some individuals displaying crab mentality believe they gain direct benefits, such as a better chance at a promotion or maintaining their standing in the group.

This “if you win, I lose” thinking is a corrosive force. When organizations prioritize internal competition, they create a breeding ground for this mentality, where someone else’s gains are viewed as a personal loss.

Signs of Crab Mentality on Your Team

Crab mentality isn’t always overt. It often appears as subtle undermining, quiet resentment, or a general lack of support—behaviors that erode trust over time.

When someone on the team tries to achieve more, they are often pulled back by others who are jealous or feel threatened. This dynamic can create a palpable sense of misery within the group. Leaders must realize the underlying causes to address them effectively.

Below are seven examples of how crab mentality can manifest in the workplace:

1. Downplaying Achievements: Team members dismiss or minimize people’s accomplishments with sarcasm or backhanded compliments.
2. Withholding Celebration: Individuals refuse to celebrate other people’s accomplishments, like promotions, and are quick to question their merit.
3. Passive-Aggressive Behavior: This includes gossip disguised as concern, “forgetting” to invite someone to a key meeting, or giving compliments with a negative twist.
4. Hoarding Information: Team members intentionally withhold information or refuse to give credit for collaborative work, undermining team cohesion.
5. Resisting Innovation: New ideas from rising team members are often shot down, stifling creativity and progress.
6. Fostering an “Us vs. Them” Mentality: Peers are viewed as rivals rather than collaborators, creating division and distrust.
7. Low Morale Despite High Performance: The team might hit its targets, but the emotional atmosphere is guarded, cynical, or negative.

In a key study, researchers found that workplace envy was strongly linked to “social undermining”, behaviors intended to hinder another’s success or well being. These subtle actions silently destroy collaboration.

The Inner-Core Issue: What The Pull-down Syndrome Reveals

At its core, crab mentality isn’t about bad employees; it’s a leadership issue. It signals a failure to develop emotional maturity and a healthy inner core across the team. It reveals that leaders must first address their own issues, as accountability and self-awareness are the foundation of growth.

Leaders often spot the behaviors of crab mentality, but they miss the root cause. These actions are only symptoms. To truly address the problem, you must face the reality of your organization’s culture.

As I explain in my book Intelligent Leadership, your inner core (your character, values, and mindset) drives your outer behavior. A compromised inner core leads to compromised leadership.

Crab mentality flourishes where the inner core is underdeveloped, allowing fear and insecurity to dictate actions.

Within any social group, whether a department or a family, this mentality can spread if not addressed, reinforcing negative behaviors. The crab mentality can manifest in various groups, including families, where toxic dynamics such as jealousy, sabotage, and undermining are often fueled by low self-esteem among its members.

Culture Magnifies the Inner Core

Crab mentality is rarely an isolated problem; it’s enabled and amplified by the organizational culture. When a culture tolerates favoritism, silos, or gossip, it unintentionally rewards the very behaviors that pull people down.

In toxic cultures, individuals can become victims of crab mentality, caught in cycles where others’ envy and negativity hold them back. Some may even adopt a victim mindset, which further hinders their personal growth and ability to break free from limiting beliefs.

You can’t fix this with new policies. You must model and foster:

• Humility over ego
• Courage over control
• Purpose over performance metrics alone

These traits flow from leaders who have developed their own inner core and are committed to cultivating it in others.

Behavior transforms when mindsets transform, and mindsets transform when the inner core is awakened. This helps overcome the “misery loves company” mentality.

Breaking Free: Empowering Teams to Rise Together

At its heart, crab mentality is fueled by a powerful psychological barrier: limiting beliefs. The most common is a false belief in scarcity, or what psychologists call zero-sum thinking, the incorrect belief that one person’s success must come at the expense of others. This bucket mentality is a cognitive trap.

Research shows that people under stress are more prone to these cognitive biases, viewing another’s success as a threat. This mindset, sometimes called “barrel syndrome” or “bucket mentality,” leads directly to the resistance and sabotage characteristic of crabs in a bucket.

My coaching work has shown me how these beliefs can ripple through a culture, reinforcing fear and jealousy.

Left unchallenged, these beliefs don’t just stall one person; they cap the entire team’s potential for achieving success. When individuals react negatively to a person’s success, by withholding support or undermining achievements, crab mentality takes hold and ultimately hinders people’s progress within the team.

Rewiring Toxic Thinking Patterns

One of the Seven Dimensions of Intelligent Leadership is Thinking Patterns. When these mental models are dominated by fear or comparison, toxic behaviors like crab mentality follow.

Shifting these patterns is the first step toward a healthier culture. Here are four key elements you can use:

1. Promote Awareness

• Help your team identify thought traps like “If they win, I lose.”
• Normalize conversations about envy, status pressure, and emotional triggers in competitive environments.

Read more: How to Achieve Self-Awareness in Leadership

2. Reinforce an Abundance Mindset

• Use your language and recognition programs to show that success is not a limited resource. There’s room for everyone to grow and succeed.
• Encourage team members to pursue their own ideas, even if others discourage them, and share examples of how following a new idea can lead to unexpected opportunities.

3. Celebrate Progress

• Recognize growth and effort at every level, not just the final outcome.
• This builds a culture where every person feels valued.

4. Challenge Limiting Beliefs

• When you notice crab mentality in others, use similar methods to raise awareness and challenge their thinking.
• Gently reframe success as something that expands opportunity, not restricts it.

This is coaching from the inside out. You don’t just correct behaviors—you develop the mindsets that produce better ones. When leaders model vulnerability and replace comparison with compassion, the team begins to rise together.

Applying Intelligent Leadership to Dismantle Crab Mentality

Crab mentality almost always points to a breakdown in leadership maturity. But the good news is that leaders can turn this around. Unchecked, this mentality can lead to the group’s collective demise. By applying these strategies, teams can become more successful.

It starts with your inner core and extends to how you build trust and create a culture where everyone is empowered to win. Let’s walk through four powerful strategies to dismantle the crab mentality and replace it with confidence and collaboration.

Recognizing and celebrating other people’s accomplishments not only reduces envy and jealousy but also inspires growth and positively impacts the lives of everyone on the team.

1. Build Inner-Core Strength

Insecurity is a primary driver of crab mentality. To break this cycle, you must start with character development and emotional maturity. This is about building self-confidence.

Leaders must encourage courageous self-awareness. This means:

• Encouraging open feedback without fear.
• Leading by example and admitting mistakes.
• Recognizing personal wins, not just big outcomes.

To truly grow, individuals must move beyond a ‘crab brain’ mindset(the instinct to pull others down) and instead support each other’s progress. This mentality can even appear among family members, who may undermine each other out of fear or jealousy.

This inner work builds security, the ultimate antidote to envy. People tend to compare themselves to others, but by focusing on people’s accomplishments and celebrating their successes, you can foster a more positive and supportive environment.

2. Redesign for Collaboration, Not Comparison

The crab mentality thrives in cultures that reward individual performance at the expense of collective success. Intelligent leaders understand that true success is shared.

Here’s how to create a “we” culture:

• Publicly celebrate team wins, not just individual stars.
• Implement peer-recognition programs that foster gratitude.
• Reward mentorship and collaboration in performance reviews.
• Encourage team members to support and celebrate other people’s progress, reinforcing the value of recognizing and uplifting others’ achievements.
• Encourage team members to act as friends who genuinely support other people’s success.

Gallup’s research confirms that when employees feel recognized and aligned with team goals, engagement soars. If success on your team feels like a zero-sum game, it’s time to rewrite the rules.

3. Coach from the Inside-Out

One-size-fits-all coaching won’t fix this deep-seated issue. Leaders must go deeper to help team members understand their own triggers and limiting beliefs. A key part of this is helping them address their feelings of resentment toward a person’s success, which can hinder their own growth.

What this looks like in action:

• Using diagnostic tools to identify maturity levels.
• Tailoring development plans to build both competence and confidence.
• Encouraging periods of rest to maintain sustainable growth and improve well being.
• Supporting team members in becoming better, not just doing better. Leaders can also help team members view people’s success as emotional motivation for their own growth, fostering a positive and supportive team environment.

4. Create Alignment Through a Shared Vision

A team without alignment will drift toward blame and competition. But when every person understands why their work matters, they begin to root for one another. This sense of shared purpose can make a team feel like a supportive family, working toward common own goals.

To drive alignment:

• Reiterate the mission often and in practical terms.
• Involve the team in shaping goals and strategies.
• Connect daily work to long-term impact.

McKinsey’s research proves that teams with a strong purpose outperform others because alignment creates meaning, and meaning fuels performance.

When groups are aligned around a common vision, they are better equipped to resist the negative effects of crab mentality and foster positive, collaborative behavior.

Conclusion: From Bucket to Breakthrough

Ultimately, crab mentality is a mirror reflecting your leadership and your culture. It’s a social phenomenon closely related to tall poppy syndrome, where people are attacked or resented for their success.

The key difference is that crab mentality focuses on preventing anyone from getting ahead in the first place, by pulling them back into the bucket, while tall poppy syndrome is about cutting down those who have already achieved a high level of success. Both stem from a place of envy and a jealous reaction to people’s accomplishments.

As a leader, your role is to counteract this instinct by celebrating people’s successes and others’ successes as inspiration for the entire group.

If you’re facing this challenge, start by looking inward. Lead with humility. Then, turn your focus outward to create clarity and model collaboration. Don’t let other crabs pull you or your team down.

The goal isn’t just to stop toxic behavior—it’s to unlock greatness. When leaders lead intelligently, the bucket disappears, and every crab finds the courage to climb. Your entire organization’s life and future depend on it.

If you found these insights valuable, you’ll find even more depth in my work. My books offer powerful strategies for transforming leadership culture from the inside out:

• Intelligent Leadership – Learn how to unlock your full leadership potential and build a values-driven culture. Buy on Amazon.
• Cultural Transformations – Discover case studies and tools to reshape organizational culture and eliminate toxic dynamics like crab mentality. Buy on Amazon.
• Talent Leadership – A must-read for leaders looking to attract, develop, and retain high-potential talent in high-pressure environments. Buy on Amazon.

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