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Several recent works have found the emergence of grounded com-positional language in the communication protocols developed bymostly cooperative multi-agent systems when learned end-to-endto maximize performance on a downstream task. However, humanpopulations learn to solve complex tasks involving communicativebehaviors not only in fully cooperative settings but also in scenar-ios where competition acts as an additional external pressure forimprovement. In this work, we investigate whether competitionfor performance from an external, similar agent team could actas a social influence that encourages multi-agent populations todevelop better communication protocols for improved performance,compositionality, and convergence speed. We start fromTask &Talk, a previously proposed referential game between two coopera-tive agents as our testbed and extend it intoTask, Talk & Compete,a game involving two competitive teams each consisting of twoaforementioned cooperative agents. Using this new setting, we pro-vide an empirical study demonstrating the impact of competitiveinfluence on multi-agent teams. Our results show that an externalcompetitive influence leads to improved accuracy and generaliza-tion, as well as faster emergence of communicative languages thatare more informative and compositional.