kelly shu's research paper tried to identify the peter principle in the wild. She had performance data on roughly forty thousand sales workers and around a hundred 30 companies. The next step was to confirm that companies indeed use an employee's job performance as a trigger for promotion. We find that doubling in worker sales corresponds to a 30 % increase in the probability of being promoted.
People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to change.