Should Job Promotions Be Random?:
A group of Italian researchers ran a simulation of a 160-person company with a six-level pyramid structure. Each employee was assigned a degree of competence and the researchers ran two simulations comparing different ways for competence to carry over to a new position when an employee was promoted. The simulations pitted the 'Common Sense Hypothesis' where an employee is as good at their new job as at their old one against the 'Peter Hypothesis' in which they have a random chance of succeeding in their new role. In each of these cases, the researchers tested three promotion strategies: promoting the most competent employees, the least competent employees and promoting randomly. Finally, with increased corporate efficiency as the measure of success, the researchers reached their counterintuitive conclusion.
'Promoting at random or alternating the promotion of the best and the worst employees works much better according to our calculations,' said Andrea Rapisarda, the co-author of the study and a physicist at the University of Catania, in Catania, Italy. Inc. asked a handful of CEOs and management experts whether this sort of system could work in a real company.
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3 comments:
I wonder how this would affect things like morale and job satisfaction...
In a Quaker context, I wonder how this meshes with the religious meme, "do good and God will reward you; do bad and you will be punished." And how counter to reality that seems to be (no, we don't get what we think we "deserve" even when it isn't fair)...
At the front of my mind because I just read a SF story where a cybernetic intelligence tries to convince people of the futility of that meme.
Kody, they talk about that some in the article. It was interesting.
I also wonder, being trained in psychology and in experimental design, how the results would be different if people knew promotions were random (and they were); if people were told promotions were random -- but they were merit-based; and if people didn't know promotions were random, but they were.
It would be very, very interesting.
Daniel, or, in some religions, including some forms of Paganism, that it's not about the Gods punishing you, it's about cause and effect, but that doesn't mean humans can control everything. Ie, if you try to violate the law of gravity, you will fall down; but we can't control the weather (or not yet anyway).
That sounds like an interesting story -- whose is it, and what's the title?
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