The Gervais Principle

A humorous, and deadly serious, insight into how some organisations operate.

“The Gervais Principle is this:

“Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.”

Venkatesh Rao

From: The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”, 2009.

More: “A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as Clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, where the average, rationally-disengaged Loser will do. At the bottom, the overperformers can merely add a predictable amount of value. In the middle they can be used by the Sociopaths to escape the consequences of high-risk machinations like re-orgs.”

Elsewhere

Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology