Competition or collaboration ?

Intraspecific competition (from Wikipedia) “occurs when members of the same species vie for the same resources in an ecosystem.

In some instances though, individuals can collaborate because that will allow access to more or better resources.

Let’s pick a species as an example. The academic.

Should the academics in my department collaborate or compete with a sister department in another department, which is in a university with which we will merge in the coming years?

Both our departments have to recruit a new teaching assistant this year. But due to major changes in the study programme (a shift from 4 to 5 years), nobody is graduating this year and the candidates are scarce, to say the least.

We are thus competing for the scarce resources of good candidates.

But, in my opinion, the pool of potential candidate being reduced and our discipline’s ecosystem being so small, there really is no point actively competing (like hide ideas for advertising the job to each other) because it will not make a difference and can just be a source of tension between the groups. Someone however did tell me to act so this week, which I thought was really odd.

When should we collaborate and when should we compete? Some competition can be stimulating and healthy, and definitely there is a lot of competition, for students, researcher, funding,… but competing over such details, when we will in the near future be the actual same group, sounds unconstructive.

Has anybody encountered such situation or attitudes? When should collaboration be the preferred strategy?