The Effects of Promotion by Seniority in Growth-Constrained Organizations

This paper develops a balanced growth fractional flow model for the opportunities for promotion, length of service, and career earnings of personnel in a hierarchical manpower organization, and relates these characteristics to the expenditures needed to maintain the system for a specified period of operation. The primary controls available in the model are the proportions of rank members promoted to higher ranks during each period, the proportions of personnel in each rank who are promoted on the basis of seniority, and the growth rate of the sire of the system. Using an analytical approach, we investigate the responses to different emphases on seniority in the promotion process, and determine the effect of alternative system growth rates on these responses. Among significant findings are: (i) in systems of stable size, mobility, time-in-service and some career earnings characteristics are independent of the emphasis on seniority in the promotion process; (ii) both the maximum possible periods of service in each rank and the average levels of experience in each rank decrease as promotions-by-seniority increase and as the system growth rate increases; (iii) the total time served in each rank decreases as the system growth rate increases, but decreases as promotions-by-seniority increase only in systems that are stable or growing in size; in contracting systems, total time served in each rank increases as promotions-by-seniority increase; (iv) the trends for changes in the mobility of members in each rank are opposite to those for total time served in the rank; (v) the rank support costs decrease as the promotion rates, the system growth rate, and promotions-by-seniority increase, although these costs are much less sensitive to different emphases on seniority than to changes in the growth rate.