Dilbert Principle info
One way that organizations
attempt to avoid this effect is to
refrain from promoting a worker until he or she shows the skills and
work habits needed to succeed at the next higher job. Thus, a worker is
not promoted to managing others if he or she does not already display
management abilities.
The first corollary is that employees who are dedicated to their
current jobs should not be promoted for their efforts (like Dilbert
Principle), for which they might, instead, receive a pay increase.
The second corollary is that employees might be promoted only after
being sufficiently trained to the new position. This places the burden
of discovering individuals with poor managerial capabilities before (as
opposed to after) they are promoted.
Peter pointed out that a class, or caste (social stratification) system
is more efficient at avoiding incompetence. Lower-level competent
workers will not be promoted above their level of competence as the
higher jobs are reserved for members of a higher class. "The prospect
of starting near the top of the pyramid will attract to the hierarchy a
group of brilliant [higher class] employees who would never have come
there at all if they had been forced to start at the bottom". Thus the
hierarchies "are more efficient than those of a classless or
equalitarian society".
In a similar vein, some real-life organizations recognize that
technical people may be very valuable for their skills, but poor
managers, and so provide parallel career paths allowing a good
technical person to acquire pay and status reserved for management in
most organizations.
Pluchino et al. computationally modelled the behavior and tested other
promotion strategies. They found that first promoting the most
competent then the least, and also promoting randomly avoided the
effect.