Promotions and the Peter Principle
The best worker is not always the best candidate for manager. In these cases, do firms promote the best potential manager or the best worker in her current job? Using microdata on the performance of sales workers at 214 firms, we find evidence consistent with the “Peter Principle,” which predicts that firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance. We estimate that the costs of promoting workers with lower managerial potential are high, suggesting either that firms are making inefficient promotion decisions or that the benefits of promotion-based incentives are great enough to justify the costs of managerial mismatch.
Non-Technical Summaries
- Outstanding sales performance increased the probability that an employee would be promoted, and was associated with sales declines...
Published Versions
Alan Benson & Danielle Li & Kelly Shue, 2019. "Promotions and the Peter Principle*," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 134(4), pages 2085-2134. citation courtesy of 
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