Peter principle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the management concept. For the software concept, see software Peter principle. For the British television series, see The Peter Principle (TV series).
An illustration visualizing the Peter principle



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". There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when this might not be appropriate for the current situation. Peter observed this about humans.[1]



He noted that their incompetence may be because the required skills are different, but not more difficult. For example, an excellent engineer may be a poor manager because they might not have the interpersonal skills necessary to lead a team.

Rather than seeking to promote a talented "super-competent" junior employee, Peter suggested that an incompetent manager may set them up to fail or dismiss them because they are likely to "violate the first commandment of hierarchical life with incompetent leadership: the hierarchy must be preserved".[citation needed]


Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo used an agent-based modelling approach to simulate the promotion of employees in a system where the Peter principle is assumed to be true. They found that the best way to improve efficiency in an enterprise is to promote people randomly, or to shortlist the best and the worst performer in a given group, from which the person to be promoted is then selected randomly.[3] For this work, they won the 2010 edition of the parody Ig Nobel Prize in management science.[4]

Comparable texts[edit]


See also[edit]


  1. ^ Heylighen, F. (November 30, 1993). "The Generalized 'Peter Principle'". Principia Cybernetica Web. Retrieved April 11, 2014. 
  2. ^ Peter, Laurence J.; Hull, Raymond (1969). The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York: William Morrow and Company. p. 8. ISBN 0-688-27544-3. OCLC 1038496. 
  3. ^ Pluchino, Alessandro; Rapisarda, Andrea; Garofalo, Cesare (2009). "The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study". Physica A. 389 (3): 467–472. arXiv:0907.0455Freely accessible. Bibcode:2010PhyA..389..467P. doi:10.1016/j.physa.2009.09.045. 
  4. ^ "The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Winners" (PDF). Annals of Improbable Research. 16 (6): 10–13. 2010. 
  5. ^ "En el umbral de la incompetencia". La Opinión (in Spanish). Retrieved November 30, 2013.