The Peter principle revisited: A computational study (original) (raw)

Elsevier

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

Abstract

In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: ‘Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.

Section snippets

Introduction: The Peter principle

The efficiency of an organization in terms of improving the ability to perform a job, minimizing the respective costs, is a key concept in several fields like economics [1] and game theory [2]. But it could also be very important in ecology to understand the behaviour of social insects [3], in computer science when you have to allocate different tasks to a cluster of computers having different performances [4] or in science policy concerning how individual tasks are distributed among the

Dynamical rules of the model

In order to simplify the problem, we chose for our study a prototypical pyramidal organization (see Fig. 1), made up of a total of 160 positions distributed over six levels numbered from 6 (the bottom level) to 1 (the top one), with 81 members (agents) in level 6, 41 in level 5, 21 in level 4, 11 in level 3, 5 in level 2 and 1 in level 1. We verified that the numerical results that we found for such an organization are very robust and show only a little dependence on the number of levels or on

Strategies in competition: Simulation results

We realized all the simulations presented in the paper with NetLogo [23], a programmable environment designed for developing agent based simulations of complex systems. In Fig. 2 we show the time evolution of the global efficiency considering the six possible combinations among the mechanisms of competence transmission and the promotion strategies. The evolution is calculated for 1000 time steps, a duration long enough to reach a stationary (on average) asymptotic value, and is further averaged

Conclusions

In conclusion, our computational study of the Peter principle process applied to a prototypical organization with pyramidal hierarchical structure shows that the strategy of promoting the best members in the PH case induces a rapid decrease of efficiency, while it works well only if members would ideally maintain their competence at each level, a hypothesis that, although in agreement with common sense, seems in practice very unrealistic in the majority of real situations. On the other hand we

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