Should Job Promotions Be Random?

 I am guessing that not one situation springs to mind where it might seem justifiable to operate a policy of random promotions. However, the incredulous nature of the question, “Should promotions be random?” did not stop a team of researchers from the University of Catania in Italy from conducting research to find out if employees promoted via random promotion could outperform those hired through a more meritocratic process. Or more accurately, a less than full proof, meritocratic promotion process as they saw it, which had previously been called into question by the famous Peter Principle.The principle suggests that employees operating in a broadly meritocratic system will be promoted and promoted until they reach a level of competence, at which point they will fail.

So, the researchers wondered, if the meritocratic promotion was ultimately doomed to fail talent, would a random promotion system fare any better? They therefore ran a computer simulation of a 160-person company that had a six-level pyramid structure, where each employee was assigned a competence level. They tested the following three promotion strategies, using enhanced efficiency as a performance indicator:

1. Promoting the most competent employees
2. Promoting the least competent employees
3. Promoting at random

You might be surprised at what they discovered. What they found was that, (counter to what all us HR and recruiting practitioners might think), promoting at random and alternating promotion between the best and worst employers worked much better than promoting the most competent employees every time. Bombshell.

The bigger bombshell was that this was not a freak study, which is what I am guessing that most of you are thinking. No, in 2001 another computer simulation study from the University of Texas came up with similar findings and they were not even looking for it! They compared four different promotion systems—up or out, absolute merit based, relative merit and seniority based—and used a random promotion system as a baseline. And although they were expecting the random promotion system to be the worst performer, it wasn’t. It outperformed the ‘relative’ merit system and performed similarly to the up or out and seniority systems, coming second only to the absolute promotion system. They concluded that, “promotion of best performers may actually degrade the overall organizational performance, when compared with just promoting a random member of the group.”

As you can see, both these simulations showed that random promotions seemed to fair just as well as or even better than most meritocratic-based promotion systems, which now more stoutly raises the question, “Should promotions be random?” Well, in a theoretical sense, they should be random based on these findings, but whether a random promotion policy would actually work in practice in a real organization is an entirely different matter. It would certainly kill any sense of ambition within a workforce, which could lead to demoralization and could also lead to reluctant leaders, but on the other hand, people might rise to the challenge and you could discover some hidden gems. This system would also bring about a greater sense of fairness.

Although, in truth, I have no sense of whether random promotions would work in the real world, what do you think? Would random promotions work in your company or team? I’d like to hear your thoughts.