Promotion of Competence

Examples abound in the corporate world of promotions that ruined departments and organizations. Person A shows some competence at level X, either at the job or in working the superiors, and is promoted to level Y. If the person is inherently incompetent (at X and Y) the lower level group gains (from the loss of A) while the promoted causes greater havoc and pain at the higher level Y. If A was good at X, and if the skills sets for X and Y are uncorrelated (or negatively correlated) there is little evidence that A succeeds at Y. Often A fails at Y since the skills sets can be negatively correlated. So, what is the optimal way to promote? What is the effect of promoting people at random? An interesting research work examines this question.

Random promotion may be best, research suggests | Education | The Guardian: "Last month, three Italian researchers were awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. But their research was neither the beginning nor the end of the story of how bureaucracies try – and fail – to find a good promotion method.

Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, of the University of Catania, Sicily, calculated how a pick-at-random promotion scheme compares with other, more enshrined methods. They gave details in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications."