It's constantly ingrained in us that promotions are limited every year and that our same career-level peers are our competition. We're not even competing for manager positions, just small title bumps.
Also our performance ratings 1-5 (exceeds to not meets) are a forced distribution dependent on the department budget every year, i.e. if the department budget is bad, more people will get bad ratings regardless of the work they did that year so the company doesn't have to pay as much bonus. So basically my performance rating is dependent on my work and also the economy.
Is every company like this?