EVERY EMPLOYEE TENDS TO RISE TO HIS LEVEL OF INCOMPETENCE

Yusra Muhammed Subhan (M130002MS)

In an era where career excellence is seemed to be the biggest achievement that man wants to
successfully bring about or reach by effort, there lie the question of potential equivalency in
managing their responsibilities. Here comes the possibility, relevance and importance of the
theory proposed by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle which is a concept in management
theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's
performance in their current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus,
employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers
rise to the level of their incompetence." The Peter Principle is a special case of an everpresent
observation: anything that works will be used in more challenging applications until it fails. This
theory has a lot of consideration that it applies to all aspects of life. At the same time, there is lot
of criticisms and counters that requires second thoughts for the concept.
Level of Incompetence
Level of incompetence reaches its height when you are fed up with your boss and there comes
a situation where you look at your boss and wonder "Who promoted you?" or "How have you
not been fired by now?" If you already have come across such situation, take comfort in knowing
you're not alone, many have to deal with bosses that seem in over their heads. For many, the
Peter Principle (PP) was a revelation. In a mature bureaucracy people are promoted to their own
level of incompetence. When a person, working in a hierarchical bureaucracy, does his or her
task competently, he or she will gain promotion to a higher post which is more demanding. If the
person finds this new task beyond his or her capabilities he or she will then perform that task
incompetently. No further promotion will be gained and the person will, from that moment on, be
stuck in that post. The PP has about it the simple elegance of Darwin's theory of evolution. When
it is explained, you see that it must be so and you wonder who you didn't think of it yourself.
And yet it contains an insidious flaw.

The Peter Principle

It was way back in 1969, 45 years ago, that Dr. Laurence J Peter, Canadian educator and
management theorist, formulated The Peter Principle. Peters found numerous examples of top
positions filled by blundering dum-dums who werent doing their jobsor at least werent doing
them well. Peter pondered this phenomenon, and then he came up with a theoryThe Peter
Principle. He illustrated his principle by reference to a head gardener in a botanical garden who
was highly regarded for his knowledge of botanicals and his skill in growing them, a man who
spent all his day in the garden nurturing his plants. He was such an excellent gardener that when
the position of general manager of the botanical garden became vacant he was considered the
obvious choice. But with scant knowledge of inventory management, ordering, budgeting,
financial control and staff supervision, he failed. He had reached his level of incompetence. All
his knowledge of botanicals, and his ability as a hands-on gardener, was of little use in his new
indoor role. His suitability for the managerial role was inappropriately judged on his current role
of head gardener, not on the abilities needed for the new role of general manager.
The Peter Principle states that men and women in hierarchies climb the professional ladder until
they reach the level of maximum incompetence. Consider another example; picture a Web site
design company. In the basement, theres a coderlets call him Frank. He likes working alone,
he likes staring at a computer screen, and he really likes writing code. Frank does his job so well,
in fact, that he gets promoted to team leader. He accepts, of course, because the promotion comes
with a hefty raise. Unfortunately, the skills required to be a team leader are different than the
skills required to be a good coder. Now Frank has to deal with people, office drama, and
timesheets. He spends less time coding and more time at meetings. Still, he manages to hold his
team together. And eventually he gets promoted to senior manager. Now hes responsible for the
whole department. Frank was never a people person, and now he has to deal with people all day
long. His inbox seems to constantly overflow with paperwork that he has no idea how to handle.
Frank has reached his maximum level of incompetence. He cant move up because hes doing a
terrible job. And he cant move down without taking a pay cut.
In the book, he argues that Frank is the norm, not the exception. In time, every post tends to be
occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties, he writes. Work is

accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. This is
obviously a bad way to promote efficiency.
Assume the Peter Principle was true in 1969. How are technology and societal changes affecting
it? There are several reasons to believe that managerial incompetence is escalating, despite the
greater capability of those who are competentwho, in Peters words, have not yet reached
their levels of incompetence.
Strengthening Incompetence

Competent people are promoted more rapidly today. Thus, even if well-trained, they can
reach their levels of incompetence more quickly. In the rigid hierarchical organizations of
the past, promotions were usually internal and often within a group. Few employees had
to wait the 62 years and counting that Prince Charles has for his promotion, but wait they
did. Today, with the visibility that technologies enable, competent employees can easily
find suitable openings at the next higher level in the same or a different organization.
Organizational loyalty is pass. A software developer joins a competitor, an assistant
professor jumps to a university that offers immediate tenure, a full professor is lured
away by a center directorship or deanship. The quickest way to advance in an
organization can be to take a higher position elsewhere and return later at the higher

level. LinkedIn reduces the friction in upward trajectories.

Successful organizations grow more rapidly than they once did; creating a managerial
vacuum that sucks people upward. Enterprises once started locally and grew slowly. Mass
media and the Internet enable explosive growth, with technology companies as prime
examples. As a project ramps up and adds team members, experienced workers are
incented and pressured to move up a management ladder that can quickly grow to 8 or 10

rungs. A person can plateau at his or her level of incompetence while very young.
The end of mandatory retirement extends the time that employees can work at their levels
of incompetence. In 1969, Peters great teacher who became an incompetent principal

probably had to retire at 65. Today he could have a decade of poor performance ahead.
The decline of class systems and other forms of discrimination is terrific, but egalitarian
systems are less efficient if everyone progresses to their level of incompetence, whereas
competent employees trapped beneath a class boundary or a glass ceiling are ineligible

for promotion and thus fail to achieve incompetence. In the 1960s, many women found
job opportunities only in teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. Accordingly, there were

many extraordinarily capable teachers, nurses, and secretaries.

Increased job complexity is a barrier to achieving and maintaining competence. As the
tools, information, and communication skills required for a job increase, someone
promoted into the position is less likely to handle it well. The pace of change introduces
another problem: A competent worker could once count on remaining competent, but
now many skills become obsolete. Lifelong learning isnt a cheerful concept to
someone who was happy to finish school 30 years ago.

Lets consider another possibility: Do other changes wrought by technology and society
undermine the Peter Principle? The answer is yes.
Weakening the Peter Principle

Technology has so weakened hierarchy in many places that its difficult to realize how
strong hierarchy once was. Peter christened his work hierarchiology because flat
organizations are not built on promotions. The ascent at the heart of his principle is
almost inevitable in rigid hierarchies where most knowledge of a groups functioning is
restricted to the group. I worked in places where initiating a work-related discussion
outside the immediate team without prior managerial approval was unthinkable. Memos
were sent up the management chain and down to a distant recipient; the response traveled
the same way. The efficiency and especially the ambiguous formality of email broke this.
A telephone call or knock on the door requires an immediate response; an email message
can be ignored if the recipient considers it inappropriate to circumvent hierarchy. Studies
in the 1980s showed that although most email was within group, a significant amount
bypassed hierarchy. Hierarchy is not gone, but it continues to erode within organizations
and more broadly: Dress codes disappear, children address adults by first name, merged
families have complex structures, executives respond directly to employee email, and

everyone tweets.
Hierarchy benefits from an aura of mystery around managers and leaders. Increased
transparency weakens this. In hierarchical societies, rulers tied themselves to gods.
Celebrities and the families of U.S. Presidents once took on a quasi-royalty status. In The

Soul of A New Machine, the enigmatic manager West was held in awe by his team. Not
so common anymore. Leaders and managers are under a media microscope, their flaws
and foibles exposed. When managerial incompetence is visible, tolerating it to preserve
stability and confidence in the hierarchy is more challenging. In addition, internal digital
communication hampers an important managerial function: reframing information that
comes down from upper management so that your unit understands and accepts it. The
ease of digital forwarding makes it easier to pass messages on verbatim, and risky to do

otherwise because a managers spin can be exposed by comparison with other versions.
When organizations are rapidly acquired, merged, broken up, or shut down, as happens
often these days, employees have less time to reach their levels of incompetence. Unless
brought in at too high a level, they may perform competently through much of their
employment.

From the aforementioned inferences, it is hard to decide about who wins the place since there is
lack of competence metrics where a perfect judgment can be made indefinitely. But it is evident
that managerial incompetence is accelerating, aided by technology and benign social changes
that level some parts of the playing field. Two of the three counterforces rely on weakened
hierarchy, but hierarchical organization remains omnipresent and strong enough to trigger
hierarchy preserving maneuvers at the expense of competence.
Is the Phenomenon in Decline or Growing?
Extensive researches have been undergoing on this issue and still there are major results showing
the prevalence of the principle. James Ike Schaap (University of Nevada, Reno, USA) and Sy
Ogulnick (Founder, Ogulinck Leadership Consulting) in their research on existence and effect of
the Peter Principle have concluded that the Peter Principle, the phenomenon in which employees,
around the world, are said to rise to their level of incompetence, is still prevalent today and that
little regarding its use has changed since 1969. Seventy-three percent of the participants in the
study said that they have seen a Peter Principle situation happen within the last five years, while
some of the respondents did not agree that the Peter Principle even exists. The behaviors
embodied in the Peter Principle still have disrupting effects that occur only too frequently in
organizations. As a result, the Peter Principle cannot be ignored. Its effects, however, can be

remedied through extensive training of those who are promoted. It is also concluded that
occupational incompetence is always seen through the eyes of others.
There are other researches showing different conclusions also but still there is this inclination
towards Peter Principle most of the times. In a different research by David Burkus the team
found that any time that the competencies required in one level of an organization were not the
same as the competencies required to perform well at the level below, the newly promoted would
find themselves facing the possibility of their incompetence. In the creative industries, this
distinction can be quite important. Moving up in many firms can mean less time serving clients
or less time creating new projects and more time managing budgets or holding people
accountable. If the newly offered promotion involves much of the same skill set with a minimal
addition of new skills, then its likely a good fit. If however, the new position would draw you
away from your core strengths, then perhaps you should reconsider. Either way, its important to
examine whether any new competencies are ones you feel capable of acquiring. If you feel like
youd be a quick learner, then it might be worth rolling the dice. If not, then perhaps you should
pass and wait for a more fitting assignment to come along.
In 2009, a trio of Italian scientists decided to conduct a little experiment. They created a model
organization with 160 employees and six hierarchical levels. The organization was shaped like a
pyramid, with one person at the top and 81 entry-level positions. To begin, they randomly
assigned each employee an age and a competency level. The model assumes that employees
retire at age 60 and get fired if their competency drops below 4 (on a scale of 1 to 10). When a
position becomes vacant, the model promotes an employee from the level below to fill it. Under
The Peter Principle, different positions in an organization require different skill sets. So the
researchers randomly assigned employees a new competence level after each promotion. Hard
work and skill should, of course, be rewarded. The study shows that using promotions as
rewards, however, may not be a good business strategy. When the researchers assumed that
promotions would go to the most competent employees, the average efficiency of the
organization fell by 10%. For fun, they also looked at what would happen if the organization
promoted the worst employees. Efficiency rose by an astonishing 12%. Even randomly
promoting employees was a better strategy than promoting the best performers, raising average
efficiency 1%.

Conclusion
The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence,
suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process. Peter Principle
thus shows the problems in promotions and how systems are affected due to the incompetence of
higher officials. This principle seems to be more evident in hierarchical systems. There are
certain deficiencies for the principle.

When a person is promoted (the promotee), there has to be another person (the promoter)
who does the promoting. The Peter Principle depends crucially upon the promoter's job
being performed competently. The promoter must be able to distinguish competence from
incompetence in candidates for promotion. So what happens if the promoter has already

reached his or her level of incompetence?

The Principle contains a hidden assumption that the difficulty of a task, at any level in a
hierarchy, increases with increasing level, and we all know that that is not always true.
The hardest task in any hierarchy is the one you are doing. Everyone else is getting a ride

on your back especially the person who is just one level above you.
Peter Principle also assumes that there is only one kind of difficulty and only one kind of
competence. Again not true. As predicted by the principle the best football players do not
always make good managers but is it not also true that some of the best managers were

indifferent players.
The Principle predicts that when a person reaches their incompetence level they will be
only marginally incompetent. The theory does not begin to explain the ubiquitous
presence of super-incompetence. The Peter Principle may be a valuable insight; it may
explain why so many people in high places are incompetent, but thats not why they are
so abysmally incompetent.

Thus the principle emphasizes on the notion that employees will get promoted as long as they are
competent, but at some point will fail to get promoted beyond a certain job because it has
become too challenging for them. Over time, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by
someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties. The Peter Principal can
be a problem for businesses which can be solved through continued education. Even with proper
employee training, the Peter Principal predicts the employee will eventually get to a position

where they are incompetent because of further promotion. Promote better, demote, and train can
be the three ways to beat The Peter Principle. Dr. Peter sums up the Peter Principle with the
saying: "the cream rises until it sours which is the right idiomatic expression of his quote
Every employee gets promoted to his level of incompetence.