Principle of Personnel Promotion: Productivity or Politics

In hierarchical organizations, how to guarantee the “right candidate” be selected is critical for a leader to make his organization a political-sustainable development. In this paper, we propose a more realistic theory of personnel selection than theories like rank-order tournament and factionalism do. Different from these two opposite theories, we take the reality as a complexity of productivity and politics: a “more-than-one qualifier” competition among candidates would be a dominant strategy for a leader to maintain his power without losing too much economic efficiency. Based on the optimal qualifying competition the leader choose, our theory illustrates interesting interactions among economic productivity, leaders authority and the rule of law, by which we propose an illustration for the economic depression happens in some countries after implementing political reforms.