Why Your Boss is a Sociopath - Gervais Principle Explained

Promotion can select for allegiance to an organization’s official story or skill at manipulating its power structure, rather than competence at the next job.

Minimum viable effort is a rational response to misaligned incentives: when extra work advances someone else’s hidden agenda without improving your own position, effort contracts to the level required for job security.

Sincere middle managers can act as organizational shock absorbers: they transmit leadership’s official story downward while absorbing resistance and blame before either reaches the strategists above.

Power does not reveal a single social type: both people who extract value and people who create value for others can rise. Hierarchy shows position, not motive.

An extreme model can correct an equally extreme naïve belief, but it is a counterweight, not the final truth. Use suspicion to restore balance, then judge each case on its evidence.

Hierarchies tend to promote people until they reach roles whose demands exceed the abilities that earned them promotion. But the Peter Principle is a warning, not a universal diagnosis: apparent incompetence may instead emerge from misaligned roles, incentives, or coordination.

Institutions can use public values to coordinate belief while keeping strategy private. Diagnose the gap by comparing stated commitments with the incentives, actions, and quiet reversals that follow.