Efficient promotion strategies in hierarchical organizations

The Peter principle has recently been investigated by means of an agent-based simulation, and its validity has been numerically corroborated. It has been confirmed that, within certain conditions, it can really influence in a negative way the efficiency of a pyramidal organization adopting meritocratic promotions. It was also found that, in order to bypass these effects, alternative promotion strategies should be adopted, as for example a random selection choice. In this paper, within the same line of research, we study promotion strategies in a more realistic hierarchical and modular organization, and we show the robustness of our previous results, extending their validity to a more general context. We also discuss why the adoption of these strategies could be useful for real organizations. (c) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.