Promotion at random
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Office anthropology™
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Reality TV competitions, like BBC’s Traitors and Netflix’s Squid Games offer an interesting insight into group dynamics. They pit competitors against each other in a game of competition of ostensible strategy, but where the competitors know only the general objectives of the game ahead of time (survive to the end to win the game) but not specific rules (the nature or success criteria of the challenges and tasks they will face).
Some of these rules are disclosed late, others are never disclosed, and some change without warning or notice. The players are therefore in a situation of uncertainty, not risk. Risks you can game; uncertainty you cannot. This means from the players’ own perspective, their success comes down essentially to chance. They are at the mercy of the game; they have no idea whether their individual tactics will help or hinder them. They may as well be in a lottery. If they all resigned themselves to that fate, they could relax, enjoy the game and instead enjoy each others’ company. This would, of course, spoil the spectacle totally for viewers. Who wants to watch a bunch of random strangers having a nice time in a Scottish castle?
We, and the networks, can therefore be grateful it never occurs to any of the participants that they have no control over the game. They carry on as if they can beat the game, and each other, with their cunning. Even after the Faithful have ejected 8 of their own having found just one traitor — even when players they profess to be convinced are lying repeatedly turn out not to be — it never occurs to anyone to abandon the psychodrama and just draw lots.
Similar group dynamics exist in the workplace, especially where it comes to promotion and preferment.
If you can influence outcomes with certainty, it informs how you “play the game”: being political may pay off — forming and then tactically defecting on alliances, exaggerating your role on things you did do and seeking credit for things you did not — even if this risks destroying short term local relationships with people you are outcompeting.
But if you can’t influence outcomes — if the rules are shifting and unclear, then this sort of gamesmanship does not pay off. You are better to let the river take you where it will, but build enduring and healthy relationships around you in the meantime.
Those might help where the river takes the whole organisation, as it will be a stronger, higher-trust group, and better prepared to react to the unexpected.
The workplace is different from Traitors and Squid Games in an important respect: Traitors is a figure game; the workplace is an infinite one. There is no equivalent to Traitors’ known common general objective (elimination of all other contestants to win the game). The objective is just to keep playing. Relative advantages are often transient.
We think we know “the rules of the game”, but the game is complex, the rules are opaque, and they continually change with the continually changing market outside and internal organisations and priorities within. From where most of us sit, the “rules” — if there even are any — that given our advancement may as well be random.
This is what propels the experimental finding from 2010 that organisations that promote people at random do no worse than those with extensive performance appraisal processes.[1]
Curiously, “the rules being random” may be a better outcome either way, if it leads to staff prioritising cooperation, collaboration, informal relationships and trust.
See also
References
- ↑ Here is the research about random promotions. It won the 2010 Ignobel Prize in management science.