by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: January 08, 2010

First formulated in 1969 by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, the Peter Principle runs thus: "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence." This observation chimed with the widespread belief of workers that their organisations are managed or owned by incompetents, and so the Peter Principle has entered popular culture, as well as "inadvertantly" founding the social science of "hierarchiology". You know you're on to something when you can spin a whole social science out of it...

According to the pronciple, a competent employee within an organisation will be promoted until they reach the point at which they are no longer competent to do their job, at which point they will receive no further promotions.

A good example of this might be a salesperson who, having consistently hit targets and brought in big revenue for a company, is promoted to managing the sales team. At this point, they might reveal themselves to have no aptitude for managing people, in spite of their excellent sales skills, and will remain in this position, unable to progress further in the hierarchy.

Similarly, and away from the business environment, a fantastic classroom teacher will generally receive rapid promotion to run a school's department or faculty, rising to the point of becoming a Deputy Head (or Vice Principal, depending on your location), only to remain in this role, one rung below the top job for the rest of their career. And while we generally chuckle at the idea behind the Peter Principle, how incredibly frustrating must that be for its victims?

The "Peter Principle" has become so ingrained in our workplace philosophies, that there was even a sitcom produced by the same name in the late 1990s, starring Jim Broadbent, who would of course go on to win acclaim and Academy Awards in films as diverse as Moulin Rouge, Bridget Jones's Diary and Iris. Broadbent played Peter, the well-meaning, ambitious, but basically incompetent branch manager of a high street bank in modern Britain.

Although the Peter Principle sounds fascetious, and indeed Dr Peter's 1969 book "The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong" was a satirical work, the theory has been modelled and found to have some theoretical validity. In fact, the idea originated as a very specific case of a ubiquitous observation: something which has been found to work, will be tested in more and more challenging circumstances, until it fails. This has become known as the "Generalized Peter Principle".

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