A middle-aged entrepreneur was deeply interested and anxious about the "Peter Principle" phenomenon mentioned by the professor in his EMBA class, that is, every employee will eventually be promoted to an unsuitable position in the process of continuous promotion, because the situation of the case described by the professor is simply a copy of his own company.
After returning to the company, he asked the head of the human resources department to take a more scientific inventory of manpower, and comprehensively review the annual performance of the employees who have been promoted to supervisor in the last three years in the parent company and overseas branches, hoping to use statistics to verify whether his intuition and observation are correct.
After the inventory, the self-made boss took the human resources department's human resources inventory form, and was disappointed and excited to briefly tell me the "wonderful" stories of nearly a dozen "Peters": the company uses the supervisor's "annual performance target achievement rate" as the promotion standard, and these "Peters" all stand out from the crowd and have brilliant achievements, but once they are promoted to higher positions, they are no longer heroic.
There are three categories of employee performance: task, contextual, and adaptable
In the past, there was a large-scale study that echoed the "Peter Principle" phenomenon that occurred in the above-mentioned case companies. There are two particularly interesting findings from the survey results: First, for the majority of employees, the odds of excelling in higher positions are low, with only 8 %的員工可以勝任更高職位，其存活率可高達75%. Secondly, only about 21 of the current outstanding performers %的人足以勝任下一個職位，高達71% are not ready to take on important positions in the future.
The study pointed out that this is because most companies only care about employees' "past" performance and do not consider their employees' "future development potential". This explanation is insightful, but I don't think it is comprehensive, so I try to explain this typical talent management problem from the perspective of performance management theory and practice.
In terms of the theoretical evolution of performance management, employee performance is divided into three categories, the main concept that has been paid attention to at the earliest is "task performance", and then "contextual performance" has been developed, and "adaptive performance" has been developed recently.
The fundamental reason why most of the employees with outstanding performance in the organization are incompetent after being promoted to supervisor is that the company usually only takes the "task performance" of employees as the main or even the only criterion for promotion, and seriously ignores the "contextual" and "adaptable" performance of employees.
1. Task-based performance: Do employees play a good role in their work tasks?
It is mainly based on whether an individual employee can effectively complete the job responsibilities defined in the job description and assigned by the supervisor to judge the quality of individual performance. The higher the degree of effective completion of job responsibilities, the better the task performance.
2. Contextual performance: Do employees show positive social behavior in the organization?
In the early 1990s, some scholars began to put forward this concept, which refers to the social behavior of employees in an organizational environment, including behaviors such as helping colleagues, promoting cooperation among colleagues, or encouraging team members to abandon stereotypes, and a high level of dedication and professionalism to work or organization.
3. Adaptive Performance: How do employees face and deal with uncertain people and things?
As the nature of the organization and work is no longer stable and predictable, employees are facing increasing pressure to change the internal and external environment, and the static form of task and contextual performance is increasingly insufficient to reflect in the rapidly changing environment.
Since 2000, dynamic forms of adaptive performance have emerged, including how employees deal with uncertainties, how quickly they learn, how they adapt to interpersonal and cultural adaptations, how they solve problems creatively, how they behave in the face of crisis, and how they behave in the face of stress. The more positive these attitudes or behaviors are, the better the adaptive performance of the employee.
Only when the performance of the three categories is outstanding can it be called an A-level talent
The above are the three kinds of performance required by employees in the organization, each employee only needs to perform well in one of them, which has an important impact on the achievement of the overall performance of the organization; if there are two kinds of outstanding performance, it belongs to the mainstay of the company; however, to become a company's A-level talent, you must have outstanding performance in all three performances.
Click on the image to enlarge it
The Peter Principle phenomenon mentioned earlier refers to the fact that employees with outstanding performance in task performance cannot become A-level talents. In my opinion, there are three main reasons for this: 1) a lack of contextual performance, 2) a lack of adaptive performance, and 3) a lack of both contextual and adaptive performance.
Therefore, in order to have a long-lasting foundation, enterprises need to re-examine the company's performance management and employee promotion system, in the assessment of employee performance and in the decision-making of employee promotion, in addition to evaluating task performance, it is also necessary to consider the performance of employees' context and adaptive performance, and comprehensively assess the three performance of employees.
(*The author of this article is Lin Wenzheng / Associate Professor, Institute of Human Resources Research, National Central University.) This article is authorized by Jusi Culture and reprinted from the
About the Author:
Associate Professor, Institute of Human Resource Management, Chung-Ang University/Lin Wenzheng
He is currently an associate professor at the Institute of Human Resource Management and the CEO of EMBA at Chung-Ang University. He used to have a Ph.D. in Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management from Michigan State University, the director of the Institute of Human Resource Management at National Central University, the vice chairman of the Chinese Human Resource Management Association, the director of the Chinese Human Resources Development Association, the member of the Taoyuan County Labor Dispute Arbitration Committee, and the labor standards member of the Labor Commission of the Executive Yuan. His areas of expertise include international human resource management, payroll, training and development, team building and leadership, and talent management.
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