The Peter Principle / Literature

• Animorphs
  • The Big Bad Visser Three is heavily implied to be a case of this. He's pretty good as a low-level planner or squad leader in the Chronicles books, and he's fantastic as a soldier due to the brute strength of his morphed body and Ax-Crazy nature. As the organizer of a large-scale stealth infiltration of humanity, however, he's so unused to noncombat scenarios and so mentally unstable that he becomes a General Failure who murders his own troops for fun, splurges resources on poorly-planned zany schemes, and constantly itches to blow cover and start shooting.
  • As the series progressed, it became profoundly clear that this trope more or less forms the entire basis for Yeerk promotion. The two most successful Yeerk military officers in history are the aforementioned Visser Three and Visser One, a hypercompetent Emperor Scientist who rose to power by perfecting the slow-but-steady infiltration style of invasion. So what does the Council of Thirteen decide to do with their two top officers? They keep the brutish warlord Visser Three in charge of the Earth invasion where Visser One's leadership style is needed, and send Visser One off to the Anati system where Visser Three's raw asskicking is needed. This head-scratching tendency to match competent Yeerks to jobs outside of their skill can be seen over and over again in the series.
  • Taylor the Torture Technician becomes Visser Three's second in command. She is a competent scientist, an expert torturer, and a skilled emotional manipulator; all of which allows her to be quite frighteningly capable of putting Tobias through the wringer whenever she sets her sights on him. However, her sanity is even worse than Visser Three's; the human Taylor was a mentally unstable girl whose psychological issues rubbed off on her Yeerk. When put in charge of important projects, she wastes time on petty sadism, develops confused sympathy for her enemies, and gets a Villainous Breakdown when things don't go her way. Both of the Yeerk projects under her command turn out disastrously because Taylor is just too crazy for a position of responsibility.
  • The Inspector the Council sends to check in on Visser Three is a brutal warrior owing to his effective command of a Garatron body, a creature with Super-Speed. He is initially able to best five Animorphs (Jake was on vacation) in combat and heavily embarrass Visser Three. However, his smugness makes him a bad fit for this delicate job, especially since his refusal to use any battle strategy other than 'charge in and beat up the enemy at cartoonishly high speed' allows the Animorphs he's up against to figure out a way to work around his super speed and defeat him without relying on trying futilely to beat him in direct combat. And as a result, he is outwitted by the Animorphs and killed by Marco when the latter chooses to make use of a morph that the Inspector had considered not that big of a threat and therefore beneath his notice, but actually possessed traits that would make said morph capable of dealing absolutely devastating damage against the Inspector with only a single well timed attack. And since he’s successfully alienated Visser Three with his high-handed attitude and promise of giving a bad report by the time Marco's gotten him on death's door, the Visser ultimately lets him die instead of giving him medical attention.
• Dilbert.
  • Two cartoons in February 1993 featured a character called Peter, who illustrates the original principle.
  • The author of the comic wrote an entire book dedicated to how promotion has changed from this to what he calls the Dilbert Principle, in other words, instead of people getting promoted to their lowest level of competence, any and all incompetent employees are placed in the one place where they can do the least damage: Management. Which in turn leads to the creation of managers like the Pointy-Haired Boss.
    It's plausible enough in the high-skilled area he works in, Engineering and similar fields. If you wanted to avoid promoting your most talented workers out of roles in which they could use their talents (averting the Peter Principle) but you were determined to promote internally, you would end up promoting, not the most incompetent employees perhaps, but individuals who have less of a grasp on what is going on than those they supposedly supervise do.
    This isn't such a bad idea necessarily. Employers would ideally have managers that understood the industry they are in charge of, so they may hire many people at the lower levels first, and promote liberally, as in the case of the military. The manager may not necessarily be good at working at the lower levels of the organization in this case, but if they show enough ability as a manager, it may end up still working out.
• Discworld has an example that is quickly rectified at the end of the story; Sgt. Colon, a long-time member of the Watch and Knowledge Broker with ample experience on Ankh-Morpork's streets, ends up becoming a paranoid Neidermeyer in The Fifth Elephant, wherein he gets promoted to Acting Captain, driving away most of the Watch in the process. It is to his incredible relief that he is given his old position of Sergeant and been denied promotion from that rank ever since.
• Borborygmus Gog in Galaxy of Fear is clearly good at Mad Scientist and infiltration things, enough so to be put in charge of Project Starscream, which has various sub-projects that all produce interesting results. But he's frankly awful at keeping them all from being sabotaged by children. Darth Vader notices this and is snide, so Gog decides to try and find out a way to get rid of him, but guess how well that works.
• Harry Potter
  • Ministers of Magic Cornelius Fudge and Rufus Scrimgeour are promoted past their emotional competence. Fudge has a fairly charming and charismatic demeanor and public persona, and is a smooth enough operator (albeit, with assistance from Lucius Malfoy and Dolores Umbridge) to prove quite skilled at manipulating most of wizarding Britain into subscribing to his own point of view and following his agenda as well as acting in ways that can allow the ministry to put on the façade of making serious effort at fixing problems without actually making said effort at all. But he is ultimately too afraid to make hard decisions and has to see Voldemort in person to face reality, at which point he is swiftly forced to resign and subsequently replaced by Scrimgeour. Scrimgeour, meanwhile, is too proud to ask for advice, and blunders his way through and takes too many cues from Bartemius Crouch, Senior. Scrimgeour was a competent head of the Aurors prior to his election, though, and he still dies a hero's death.
  • An example of incompetence in a newly-joined hierarchy: Gilderoy Lockhart, for all his ego, is a masterful storyteller. But since flying and memory charms are the only things he can do, teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts is beyond his physical competence.
  • Defied by Albus Dumbledore, who successfully employed Peter's Parry (overtly turning down a position one knows oneself to be ill-suited for) when offered the post of Minister of Magic. He knew his own character defects, particularly his susceptibility to the temptations of power, and knew that (with apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien) he would have been far worse than Voldemort. He would have remained "righteous", but self-righteous. Thus while Voldemort multiplied evil, he left good clearly distinguishable from it. Dumbledore would have made good detestable and seem evil.
• The Heroes: Bremer dan Gorst notes that Jalenhorm would have been an excellent lieutenant, a good captain, a mediocre major and a bad colonel. But due strictly to being old friends with the King, he's been made a general, a position he isn't just unqualified for, but is actually an active liability to the army.
• Honor Harrington:
  • Played with: the Ace Pilot Scotty Tremaine, despite his preference and obvious knack, gets promoted to command a squadron of cruisers, but his superiors know of it and give him this post so he could gather some experience beyond the small-craft operations. One may presume he'll return to light attack craft and carriers, once he finishes this tour of duty.
  • The short story A Ship Named Francis is about a cruiser in the Grayson Navy, which, due to extremely rapid expansion, ended up promoting people into roles they weren't suited for. These people all got transferred to the obsolete cruiser Francis S. Mueller, thus making a ship whose entire crew has been promoted to their level of incompetence.
• Tiberius of I, Claudius is an ultimately tragic example. He's capable of taking on just about any military or governmental task as long as he is answerable to somebody, and eventually his dependability makes him the heir to the throne. His morose and paranoid personality was arguably an asset in being one of the best right-hand-men that Rome had ever seen, but it made him terrible at ruling and leading when there was no one left for him to be accountable to.
• In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, it's said that this was the fate of Eárnur, the last King of Gondor (before Aragorn, that is). He was an excellent military commander and one of the strongest warriors alive when he was out on campaign, but when he became King, his recklessness and obsession with battle became his undoing. Despite the massive importance of the line of succession, he refused to take a wife, and his attitude of Honor Before Reason resulted in him ultimately sallying out to duel the Witch-King of Angmar after receiving a challenge that couldn't have been more obviously a ploy, from which he never returned.
• In Renegades, this is what happened at the end of Age of Anarchy, as the eponymous Renegades, being the ones to end it, took control of the city. Unfortunately, while a group of friends who formed a Super Team in their basement might be excellent at fighting villains, they're not very good at ruling a state, and so, almost ten years after the Day of Triumph, the city is still partially collapsed, the administration is next to nonexistent, and many people must scavenge to survive.
• Averted in E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark Series, when the Osnomian King is much relieved by his son's adequate performance in a critical test. Had the younger man failed, the king would have had him executed for it and then would commit suicide for failure himself "...as only an incompetent would delegate an important task to another incompetent."
• The Big Bad of Michael Stackpole's contributions to the X-Wing Series, Ysanne Isard, is a fantastic Director of Intelligence for The Empire. She's ruthless, hideously smart, can convert people into Manchurian Agents, and in general is a Manipulative Bastard. However, the Council which rules the Empire some time after the Emperor is dead does not respect her advice or recognize her skills, so she has them killed. As the leader of the Empire, without checks on her authority and people vetoing her plans, Isard is terrible. She's such a Bad Boss that some of her employees defect to the New Republic, and she keeps coming up with plans like infecting Coruscant with a really, really awful Synthetic Plague and then letting them take it.
  • While Isard didn't get an actual promotion, the trope applied as soon as the Emperor died - she was already incompetent to be the one in charge of Imperial Intelligence, due to the exact tendencies (ignore the big picture to create and focus on vendettas against individuals and small groups, expend all operational assets in each operation without profit/loss reasoning, and so on) which she displayed at the start of her career. Due to the Emperor's Sith precognition allowing him to keep track of everything he fully dominated, simultaneously and in detail, Isard didn't need to be much more than an effective agent under his direction and a competent administrator.
  • Wedge vigorously attempts to avert this trope in the series, mostly by seeking to avoid promotion at all - he loves flying and isn't sure he's up to managing anything bigger than a squadron. Aaron Allston's Wraith Squadron part of the series opens with Wedge only getting Admiral Ackbar's permission to form the Wraiths with the promise that if they don't succeed, Wedge will finally accept a promotion. Either the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits expected to fail, fails, and Ackbar gets the staff officer he wants; or they succeed and Wedge gets experience that makes him even better suited for the promotion Ackbar wants him to take, including cultivating Wedge's own ability to avert this trope for the Republic military going forward.
  • Wedge also averts it by not taking Aril Nunb as his Executive Officer, citing that he needs someone who's good at training pilots during the rebuilding phase of the squadron, and that Aril's piloting skill is inherent, not something that can be taught - if she tried, the end result would be both she and the other pilots just getting frustrated with one another. He does later explain this when he accepts her into the squadron as a pilot, and she understands his reasoning.
• Ailnoth in The Raven in the Foregate is a competent clerk, but when made a village confessor his Holier Than Thou attitude imperils the flock and drives a parishioner to suicide after he publicly bars her on the (doctrinally unsound) grounds that if the flesh was weak then the spirit was unwilling. After Ailnoth ignores his last epiphany, God Himself smites him.
• In By the Sword, the Skybolts mercenary company falls under the command of a woman named Ardana when the Captain and most of the leaders are killed, leaving her the top-ranked person standing. She's incompetent to run the company but too proud to step down, nearly getting everyone killed.
• Averted in The Dragonet Prophecy; as the firstborn among his siblings, Clay would've been their "bigwings" and grown up as the leader of the group if his egg hadn't been separated from his siblings' eggs. When he reunites with them years later, he's offered the position on the principle that it should've been his in the first place, but turns it down because he knows next to nothing about his siblings or about being a Mudwing and fears what his ignorance might do to them.
• When Charles meets the Ferryman Council in The Ferryman Institute, it is revealed that the reason why Charles' countless requests for retirement were denied was specifically because of his stupendous record as a Ferryman, his success-rate ensuring that the Institute looks good in the long-run.