Laurence J. Peter

Dr. Laurence J. Peter (September 16, 1919 - January 12, 1990) was an educator and "hierarchiologist," best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle.

Life

He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his career as a teacher in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963.

In 1964, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California.

He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of the The Peter Principle, in which he states: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

From 1985 to his death in 1990, Peter attended and was involved in management of the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Humboldt County, California. He proposed an award for the race, titled "The Golden Dinosaur Award" which has been handed out every year since to the first sculptural machine to utterly break down immediately after the start.

Work

The Peter Principle is the principle that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence." While formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in a humorous book which also introduced the "salutary science of Hierarchiology" "inadvertently founded" by Peter, their 1968 The Peter Principle, the principle has real validity.

The principle 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. Peter's Corollary states that "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."

The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is "The Generalized Peter Principle." It was observed by Dr. William R. Corcoran in his work on Corrective Action Programs at nuclear power plants. He observed it applied to hardware, e.g., vacuum cleaners as aspirators, and administrative devices such as the "Safety Evaluations" used for managing change. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope. Dr. Peter observed this about humans.

In an organizational structure, the Peter Principle's practical application allows assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion based on performance in the current job, i.e. members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee's "level of incompetence" where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching his or her career's ceiling in an organization.

The employee's incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult—simply, that job is different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee usually does not possess. For example, a factory worker's excellence in his job can earn him promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned him his promotion no longer apply to his job.

One way that organizations attempt to avoid this effect is to refrain from promoting a worker until he or she shows the skills and work habits needed to succeed to the next higher job. Thus, a worker is not promoted to managing others if he or she does not already display management abilities. The corollary is that employees who are dedicated to their current jobs will not be promoted for their efforts, but might, instead, receive a pay increase.

Peter pointed out that a class, or caste (social stratification) system is more efficient at avoiding incompetence. Lower-level competent workers will not be promoted above their level of competence as the higher jobs are reserved for members of a higher class. "The prospect of starting near the top of the pyramid will attract to the hierarchy a group of brilliant [higher class] employees who would never have come there at all if they had been forced to start at the bottom." Thus the hierarchies "are more efficient than those of a classless or equalitarian society."

In a similar vein, some real-life organizations 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.

One complication is that competent employees sometimes pretend to be incompetent. The simplest reasons for this might be avoiding the jealousy of co-workers and to annoy managers. A more complex reason might be avoiding promotion to management, i.e. "Creative Incompetence," which is especially common in businesses such as big box retail store chains where managers' base pay is low and they are not entitled to overtime pay.

It may often happen for cultural reasons, such as a strong identification with the working class leading someone to remain in a working-class job rather than "selling out" or the disdain highly-skilled workers have for management decisions, leading them to avoid management jobs. Companies practicing performance improvement find that employees will deliberately "leave room for improvement" by starting at less than peak effectiveness and reach full productivity later. Employees also deliberately underperform in order to keep quotas and expectations from being set too high.

A second complication is entry-level jobs that are detail oriented and restrictive, thereby favouring detail-oriented workers, yet hinder creative and innovative workers. By definition and necessity, entry-level jobs are the assembly line of an organization, and thus the most creative and innovative employees start in positions of incompetence. The detail-oriented persons are thus promoted over the creative employees. Often these creative employees are incapable of showing their work strengths because of the structured and restrictive assembly line environments, and then are tagged as bad employees.

In reality, creative employees may be more suited to management jobs, but because they are unable to use their strengths in the low-level jobs they hold, they never rise to management, and the innate flexibility and innovation needed for managing is lost to the company. The end result for an organization as a whole is that it will collapse when the incompetents in the ranks outnumber the competent because the organization is no longer able to produce results favorable to its continual existence.

Hierarchiology

Along with the Peter Principle, Dr. Peter also coined "hierarchiology" as the social science concerned with the basic principles of hierarchically organized systems in the human society.

Having formulated the Principle, I discovered that I had inadvertently founded a new science, hierarchiology, the study of hierarchies. The term hierarchy was originally used to describe the system of church government by priests graded into ranks. The contemporary meaning includes any organization whose members or employees are arranged in order of rank, grade or class. Hierarchiology, although a relatively recent discipline, appears to have great applicability to the fields of public and private administration. (Peter and Hull 1969)

Quotes

• In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
  • The Peter Principle (1968), ch. 1
  • Statement of the Peter Principle

• Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
  • Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977) ISBN 0-688-03217-6, p. 83

• Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object.
  • Peter's Quotations, p. 324

• When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.
  • Peter's Quotations, p. 418

Legacy

Although humorous, Peter's book contains many real-world examples and thought-provoking explanations of human behavior. Similar observations on incompetence can be found in the Dilbert cartoon series (such as "The Dilbert Principle"), the movie Office Space, and the television show The Office.

In 1981 Avalon Hill made a board game entitled The Peter Principle Game, based on Peter's book.

Major publications

• The Peter Pyramid or will we ever get the point? (1986) ISBN 0044400578
• Why things go wrong
• Peter's Almanac
• Peter's People
• Peter's Quotations
• The Peter Plan
• Individual Instruction
• Classroom Instruction
• Therapeutic Instruction
• Teacher Education
• The Peter Prescription
• The Peter Principle (with Raymond Hull) (1968)
• The Laughter Prescription (1982)
• Prescriptive Teaching

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. 1969. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York, NY: William Morrow & Company, Inc.
• E. Lazear. 2000. The Peter Principle: Promotions and Declining Productivity Hoover Institution and Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.

External links

• A Glossary of Incompetence Time Magazine, Friday, Mar. 28, 1969. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
• The Nartreb Principle Retrieved May 21, 2008.

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