Do employees start at similar positions? Employees begin at different positions in this firm's career tournament, and, unlike auto races where the "pole position" gives only minimal advantages over a 500-mile race; early jobs give decisive advantages to some employees. The tournament is not equal from the outset.
Are individuals allowed to begin competing at the time of their own choosing? Tennis tournaments implicitly assume that individuals enter the tournament when they are ready to do so. Tennis tournaments are held every year, and individuals who are not ready can wait another year before entering. This is not the case with the career tournament. As soon as one begins working in an organization, one must enter the career tournament. Individuals do not have the option to say that they are not ready to compete for advancement. Indeed, the management literature warns that when a boss asks a subordinate to take a more demanding job (a new test in the tournament), the subordinate does not have the option of delaying the test (Shaeffer 1972). Individuals who refuse this request usually do not get a second chance.
Consequently, women and men who are not ready to compete for advancement in their early years because they want to devote time to starting their families, caring for an ill parent, or developing an vocational interest are effectively ruled out of the tournament. If they subsequently develop ambition and a willingness to devote time to the organization, the tournament structure provides no opportunity for them to do so.
The logic of the tournament specifies certain conditions to make the competition fair, open, and efficient. The findings of this and other studies provide evidence suggesting that these conditions are not met. Clearly, for a career system to satisfy its aim of opportunity and efficiency, some modifications are required along these dimensions.
The policy implications of these findings are straightforward. For a tournament to conform to its assumptions, it must make its rules public, it must reduce the effects of starting positions, and it must allow employees more choice about when they wish to begin competing. Organizations which fail to meet these preconditions for a tournament will tend to be unfair to employees and may deprive the organization of the full use of employees' talents.
Of course, as a practical matter, some of these preconditions may be difficult to satisfy. Starting all employees in equal positions may not be possible, since different entry jobs are likely to be differently valued. Efforts to make entry jobs more equal may be desirable in such circumstances, but it's not clear that equality can be accomplished (Dahrendorf 1968). On the other hand, equal knowledge and choice about when one competes should be relatively easy to accomplish, and these factors may reduce the importance of initial status inequalities.
These preconditions are not just important for the fairness of the selection system, they also affect its efficiency. At a time when men are increasingly more involved with child-care and household responsibilities and women are increasingly more career oriented, the timetable imposed by the tournament forces the career system to neglect important segments of the work force. The tournament's timetable may have been relatively more appropriate in previous decades (when men may have been less family oriented and women less career oriented), but in the present era, this system is likely to eliminate some top candidates (Bailyn 1980).
Preconditions for Efficiency in Tournament Career Systems
Tournaments offer efficiency by making early selections which limit the number of employees requiring investments and by permitting the organization's investments to be amortized over longer periods of time.
However, to be efficient, tournament career systems must meet certain preconditions: (1) they must use appropriate selection criteria, (2) they must increase amortization time, and (3) they must not reduce productivity by their selections. The findings of this study raise doubts about each of these points.
Tournaments Must Use Appropriate Selection Criteria
Besides being determined by explicit decisions, selection criteria are also determined implicitly by the structure of the selection process. An early selection system like the tournament limits the type of ability and performance that it evaluates, and it permits certain kinds of errors which raise doubts about its appropriateness for contributing to efficiency. It defines ability in terms of "fast starters," it limits assessments to short-term performance outcomes, it specifies how much selection error will be permitted, and it even suggests what kinds of selection errors will or will not be corrected by the system. The following review of these considerations indicates that an early selection system requires the use of selection criteria and procedures which may be inappropriate for selecting the most able employees.
A central feature of this selection system is that it makes its decisions very early. Early job statuses have lasting effects on career attainments; and, according to the career-tree diagram, subsequent selections are made soon after individuals arrive in each successive job. Individuals who get to the top rarely spend more than 3 years in any level and less than 2 years in each job (since employees are expected to hold more than 1 job at a level before being promoted).
One implication of an early selection system is that it selects only "fast starters." Ability must emerge very quickly if it is to be recognized and selected. According to popular idiom, fast starters are individuals who show their ability from the outset, although the term may carry connotations of superficiality. Late bloomers are individuals who take longer to show their abilities. Although this selection system does not state an explicit preference between these types of ability, its early selections make it inevitable that fast starters have great advantages in this system, and late bloomers are likely to be left behind and never recognized.
A career structure which makes early and rapid selections tends to allow more selection errors than one that makes late and slow selections, for the former's selections will be based on fewer performances. Indeed, March and March (1977) suggest that performance sampling error could be a major factor determining which employees are selected as fast-starting top executives. Moreover, individuals may also use this to their advantage; they may scheme to present misleading impressions and to take advantage of these "errors," knowing that their opportunism cannot be discovered in the short run. Opportunism is even more likely when individuals cannot be blamed for the long-term costs of their short-term decisions (see Williamson [1975] for a discussion of the economics of opportunistic behavior). Rapid, early selections increase the risk of errors due to both the limited performance samples and the short-term nature of the outcome.
The risks of selection errors are even greater in a sponsored system. For instance, a small sponsored program for high-potential people may rapidly advance a few young employees to be contenders for top management, but in so doing may exempt them from some of the scrutiny of a tournament, thereby creating a risk that low-ability individuals in these programs will not be discovered. Moreover, sponsored programs tend to operate regardless of the abilities of the individuals who happen to be in any particular cohort, and such a system carries the risk that the term "high-potential people" does not so much describe a type of person as it describes a predefined role to which some individuals will be assigned regardless of their personal qualities. By the training, socialization, and social labels it confers, the career system may be creating many of the individual differences which it presumes to be using for its selections. Although organizations go through intermittent periods of concern about whether they are finding the most talented managers, they less often attend to the question of whether the talent they are identifying is really as good as their high-potential programs assume. If the ability differences are not great, then later selections would less seriously prejudge the issue and might give more extensive performance samples from which to infer ability.
From a policy perspective, the short-term orientation in tournament and sponsored career systems could be a particularly serious problem for organizations. It gives the message that ambitious employees do not need to consider long-term consequences of their behavior. These consequences will be someone else's concern if they are successful in continuing in their fast-rising trajectory, and their career histories teach them to expect that they will be. No doubt some do get caught. If they get stuck in their job more than 2 years, they may have to face up to the consequences of their having ignored long-term outcomes. This may even be a factor in explaining why those who stay in a level more than 3 years are unlikely to advance further. But the individuals who were successful do not have to face these consequences, and they are the ones who end up filling the top levels of the organization hierarchy.
