Team Oriented vs. Competition Oriented

Many companies in descriptions of their positions they are trying to fill have mention that the company culture is team oriented with dedicated team members and that anyone who works with them should be the same way. Companies are right to demand this team oriented mindset a requirement for employees. However, it is important that one keeps in mind that the company who is looking for a team player is not looking for a competitive person, or are they?
Those competitive positions are also very obvious in the ads employers post. There are key words like 'competitive salary,' 'bonuses for performance,' 'fast movement up the ladder.' The fact of the matters is that as job seekers we see these linguistic gems and we already have a slight feeling of what the job and environment would be like.
First and foremost, each person who is seeking a job should realize which environment he or she would be able to work in. In my case, I cannot work in a competitive environment because it seems to be quite demoralizing and there is the factor of not being passionate about the work. In my case, I can only be competitive with something that is a passion of mine, which most corporate jobs aren't a passion that I have.
Despite this delineation, I have seen in my jobs, which have all been team oriented, that sometimes a competitive person slips into the crowd and tries to do everything better, to be intimidating, and whenever necessary to belittle his or her colleagues. The whole problem with this approach though is that in my experience a competitive worker in a team oriented environment will eventually learn to stop competing, quit the job, be release of his or her duties at said job, and very rarely move up.
Working in a team can be and very often is quite stressful. There are different personalities to deal with and there are different work ethics, and when the element of competition is involved the project, company, and client are the ones that suffer. While healthy competition might be decent and help everyone stay on their toes, as it were, most of this competitive spirit is not healthy and can turn into resentment and go to the extreme of being counter-productive or ever detrimental.
At a job I had a couple of years ago in the IT industry; I was given an account to work on that was right in the middle of production. In addition to this, it was very complex and sometimes it seems unmanageable. In my team, there were people that were late with their portion of the project, which would in turn make me late, only and only if I were able to isolated and correct the issues before I passed it along to the next step. The person who was waiting for my completed portion of the project had to wait a few hours. While this is certainly not optimal, it is just a part of working in a team.
But when a competitive person infiltrates a team, it is the whole team who has to be aware of and watch out for the competitive worker. Once I had a worker hack my email and destroy a file that I was to deliver to a client. My co-worker had been at that job which I had just started for almost ten years. He had never been promoted and never had he been a linguist, proofreader or editor. However, this person was highly competitive in that he kept track of how many mistakes no matter how small everyone else on the team made, but had tons of excuses when he made a mistake. But he took it even a step further by belittling his team members over inconsequential matters. Eventually, management made the decision that his competitive streak was not something that was beneficial to the team or beneficial to the company and he was released from his duties.
However, if one is a team player working in a team environment the whole concept of working in a team works much better. Workers perform their functions with each other for a common goal and if the team does well not only do they benefit but the whole company does. There are times when clients have seemingly unattainable requests, but when a team comes together and works toward the goal, morale is up and the client is happy.
There are circumstances that involve a team player who is in a competitive environment where he or she is in direction competition with their co-workers. For the team player this more often than not a very undesirable environment in which he or she will underperform and not be very respectful, because it is a popularity contest and it is to see which worker is better or the best- for whatever reasons management chooses.
So when it comes to choosing one's career it is important that we understand ourselves, how we work best, in what situations we flourish, and in what situations we should not work. Self understanding and keeping tabs on ourselves and our lives will help in building a happy life and a happy career.