LeaderLab » peter http://theleaderlab.org Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:13:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 en hourly 1 Book Review: The Peter Principle http://theleaderlab.org/2010/01/book-review-the-peter-principle/ http://theleaderlab.org/2010/01/book-review-the-peter-principle/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:44 +0000 david http://theleaderlab.org/?p=77 I’m going to stretch my rule on reviewing solid, researched books on leadership or organizational theory. The Peter Principle is in, fact theory. However, it hasn’t been researched because it’s also satire. The Peter Principle is both a book by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull and an organization principle similar to Parkinson’s Law.

The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” The Peter Principle introduced the “salutary science of Hierarchiology,” “inadvertently founded” by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modeled and has theoretical validity. Peter’s Corollary states “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”

One way that organizations attempt to avoid this effect is to refrain from promoting a worker until he shows the skills and work habits needed to succeed at the next higher job. Thus, a worker is not promoted to managing others if he does not already display management abilities. The first solution is that employees who are dedicated to their current jobs should not be promoted for their efforts; instead, they might receive a pay increase. The second solution is that employees might be promoted only after being sufficiently trained to the new position. This places the burden of discovering individuals with poor managerial capabilities before (as opposed to after) they are promoted.

Despite beginning as satire, some real-life organizations now recognize that technical people may be very valuable for their skills but poor managers, and so provide parallel career paths allowing a good technical person to acquire pay and status reserved for management in most organizations. For that, we have The Peter Principle to thank.

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