People aren't static, nor are companies or roles within them. Treating every person as unchanging and treating the requirements of each level in the hierarchy as unchanging are just plain bad assumptions to make.
People grow. Companies change.
This book was meant as satire, and the fact that so many people take it as fact is honestly quite concerning.
"In 2018, professors Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue analyzed sales workers' performance and promotion practices at 214 American businesses to test the veracity of the Peter principle. They found that these companies tended to promote employees to a management position based on their performance in their previous position, rather than based on managerial potential. Consistent with the Peter principle, the researchers found that high performing sales employees were likelier to be promoted, and that they were likelier to perform poorly as managers, leading to considerable costs to the businesses.[15][16][2]"
The Peter Principle might be downstream of the Monotonic Pay Scale, where it is expected that a person who manages others must be paid more than any of them. Conversely, no matter how good you are or how much money you are making the business, you will reach a point where your pay is effectively capped unless you transition to management.
The government suffers from this especially, despite an ostensibly very different incentive structure. The explosion in government contractors (by which I mean, individuals indirectly employed to do jobs in lieu of direct hires) seems to be driven in no small part by this problem.
> This book was meant as satire, and the fact that so many people take it as fact is honestly quite concerning.
The article says it was satire but it also says it was based on their real research. Also satire doesn’t necessarily mean something is meant to be untrue
Yep, many “just-so” stories have some aspect of truth. I feel like people citing the Peter principle as a cliche explanation for many things that are likely to be overdetermined probably correlates with intelligence, as it takes greater intelligence to consider more complicated models of career advancement.
That particular passage in the Wikipedia article on the eponymous book being satire is worded extremely poorly. Satire is a common format for making social commentary. The occurrence in organizations of Lawrence Peter's findings, now known as the Peter Principle, is the social commentary being communicated by the book. It is a phenomenon which had previously been established as occurring prior to the book in Lawrence Peter's research and was the entire basis for the eponymous book being written by Raymond Hull.
People grow. Companies change.
This book was meant as satire, and the fact that so many people take it as fact is honestly quite concerning.