<p>This paper offers a critical reappraisal of tournament theory, a cornerstone of organizational economics that models promotions and compensation as rank-order contests. While tournament theory has been widely praised for its efficiency-enhancing properties, its broader social and normative consequences remain insufficiently examined. Drawing on Elizabeth Anderson’s framework of relational egalitarianism, <i>Private Government</i>, and <i>Hijacked</i>, the paper argues that tournaments function not merely as incentive mechanisms but also as institutional and ideological arrangements that entrench domination and legitimate inequality. Institutionally, tournament-based evaluations exemplify the “private government” of the workplace, in which the rules of competition are unilaterally imposed by employers. Ideologically, they align with neoliberal meritocracy, transforming the work ethic into a discourse that moralizes failure and naturalizes steep disparities. Together, these dynamics help explain both the persistence of tournament structures and their cumulative social consequences, including the erosion of trust and the narrowing of evaluative horizons through which worth and responsibility are understood. Rather than proposing a comprehensive alternative model of organizational governance, the paper offers a diagnostic account of tournament logic’s normative implications and highlights the need for management theory to attend not only to the efficiency of incentive systems but also to their moral and social consequences.</p>