HRpedia: 'The Peter Principle'
Promotions beyond one's level of competence
The Peter Principle, n.
It’s a pretty obvious truism to say that everything works until it doesn’t. Whenever something works well at a task, we feel that it is probably within its capabilities to do a more taxing task. That roughly captures the gist of promotion within an organisation.
Oh, you seem good at X. Let’s try you out on Y. Hey, you’re pretty good at Y too. You’re welcome to try your hand at Z. Oh. You’re not really so great at Z. Bummer.
This is the ‘Peter Principle’ — the theory that employees are promoted to the level at which they become incompetent. This happens because we tend to rate people based on their ability at the task they do now, rather than projecting whether they have the skills to handle the task they will be doing.
A classic example is feeling the need to promote a long-serving technical specialist or engineer to a management role, only to find that social interaction was never really their strongest suit.
Laurence J. Peter, the eponymous ‘Peter’ behind the principle, claimed that eventually “every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties”, and that in a company the only good work is done by those who have not yet reached that point.
In work that won an Ignobel prize, it was shown in simulations of a company where the ‘Peter Principle’ is held to be true that the best way to maximise efficiency is to either promote employees randomly, or to shortlist both your worst and best worker for every promotion and then choose between them arbitrarily.
The best way to avoid falling into issues with the principle is to select candidates for promotion based on their core competencies for the role which they are being considered for, and not by how well they do in their current role. Providing in-house training to those being promoted may also serve to mitigate the problem, or having parallel career paths which don’t necessarily involve complete shifts in required skills.
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