Forcing and detouring

A standard career ladder document is often aggressively detailed, listing out competencies, delivery outcomes, behavioral qualifications, technical achievements, and more, for what it takes to reach each level in an organization. What is usually missing from those same documents is any sense of the pyramidal shape of the structures they define. That is, at each level of the ladder, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. If a team of ten engineers each work hard and meet the requirements of a senior engineer, but the organization only has budget for two senior engs, only two people are getting promoted. Promotions are both scarce and competitive; they create winners and losers. What happens to the losers? Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf ask this question of military dictatorships, digging into historical data from Argentina and elsewhere. While it’s often presumed that dictatorships operate on nepotism rather than merit, they find that merit-based systems are in fact common among…