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Laurence J. Peter was a professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Southern California. He wrote a satirical book called “The Peter Principle” in the eighties. The text came after a long observation about how hierarchies were managed in organizations. Its basic focus is that successive promotions make people incompetent.
It is said that this principle had already been discovered by José Ortega y Gasset, when he formulated the following concept in 1910: “All civil servants should be demoted to their next lower grade, because they were promoted until they became incompetent”.
Based on this premise, Laurence Peter formulated two major conclusions, which have since been a point of reference within the administrative world:
- Over time, every “position” tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to perform his duties.
- The work is carried out by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Peter’s principle in detail
Clearly, the Peter Principle alludes to the fact that the higher people rise in their positions, the more incompetent they become. But why does this happen? The answer lies in the very dynamics of promotions, which at first seek to reward a good employee, but which in the long run can cause difficulties for him/her.
Photo by Laurence J. Peter
Let’s look at this carefully. There is an employee who excels at what he does. Suppose a bank teller, who always has everything ready on time and never fails in his work . As a reward for his good performance, the organization decides to promote him to head of tellers. To perform this new role, the old cashier needs to acquire new knowledge and new skills, which initially implies a certain drop in their performance level.
However, if you are someone very smart and committed, in a short time you can develop your new work with full efficiency. Therefore, you are likely to win a new promotion and then start the cycle again. This will repeat itself until you reach the position in which you will be incompetent, so you will not be worthy of a new promotion.
What Peter postulates, then, is that because hierarchical organizations work under this type of model, the employees in the highest positions tend to have a high degree of incompetence. They are there because they can no longer go up , but at the same time on this path they lost the possibility of doing what they were most capable of doing.
Avoid promotions?
The work written by Laurence Peter initially had a sarcastic purpose, but it had such an impact that it has also been used as an important point of reflection in organizations. The obvious question, once this hidden mechanism behind promotions becomes evident, was: So is it better not to promote employees? Wouldn’t the impossibility of a promotion end up discouraging people who work?
What was concluded is that the ideal measures so that high positions are not occupied by people pushed to their limit of incompetence are two: the learning ladder and a new criterion in the definition of salaries. Learning ladders are a mechanism to accompany professional activities with training processes, which also allow evaluating how prepared a person is to take on a new position.
The new criteria for setting salaries are a good idea, difficult to apply. The aim is to reward good employees with a higher salary and not necessarily with a rise. This would imply, in the long run, that two people in the same position could have very different salaries.
It is predictable that this lack of symmetry will translate into professional conflicts, so it is difficult to implement. What has certainly been implemented is the scheme of offering bonuses and privileges to the best performing workers, under certain pre-defined assessment guidelines.
In any case, the fact is that Peter’s principle confronts us with a great paradox: people with more power and decision-making ability are likely to have a high degree of incompetence. And they have the fate of many in their hands. Is this why the great solutions for society never arrive?
