by Courtney Keskinen

Created on: January 17, 2008   Last Updated: January 18, 2008

I have been in the work world for ten years now, always having a job from the time I was 15 years old. I have held numerous part time and full time jobs while getting through high school and college. I have done everything from working at movie theater to cleaning doctors offices to handling a company's payroll and accounting. I realized there was one thing all of these jobs seemed to have in common: I had been a witness to "The Peter Principle." I didn't even realize what this was until a friend and I were discussing it recently it was a concept I had seen at nearly every job, I just didn't realize it had a title.

For those of you who may be as unlearned of the concept as I was, it is simply this: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Look around your place of employment sometime. Do you see employees who merely act as seat fillers but earn larger salaries simply because they have higher seniority? Are you delegated tasks by someone who earns more money, yet doesn't seem to have any real "work" to do? This seems to be commonplace and I don't think in this age of technology and "Corporate America" that it will get better anytime soon. Many companies have become so large that any formal and detailed evaluation has been replaced with the idea that longevity is more powerful. Therefore, if this employee has worked at a company for 10 years, said company may be more lax in reprimanding them on lack of production and performance. A promotion may even come for the employee not based on merit or performance, but rather the fact that they have managed to show up to the same place of work for years. As a result, the employee never really seems to gain back the motivation that may have once inspired them to go "above and beyond." Many could believe, "why bother? I'm getting paid either way."

The debate is whether its more prevalent with salary positions or with hourly employees? I have heard arguments for both sides. On one hand, you look at an employee who works for salary pay, generally receiving the same paycheck whether they work 8 or 12 hours a day. One who doesn't have an independent driving force or self motivation could become complacent to their work, feeling they never get rewards for their extra time and effort and thus, "it's not worth it." On the other hand, I have heard managers excuse the low production and performance rates of hourly employees, explaining, "you get what you pay for." This logic is an attempt to explain

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