The unwritten practice of academic benchmarking in organizational hierarchy—An analysis

Abstract

The paper investigates the reasons why decision makers often prefer individuals with high academic credentials for promotion and leadership positions. It also examines how the process of attaining higher education develops special personality traits, which hold the attention of decision makers favorably, and seem to be crucial for the organizational success. The study further explores the correlation between higher educational attainments and corporate hierarchy.The findings of our survey are discussed in the light of both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data. The result of the Pearson's Chi-square test rejects null hypothesis of independence between higher academic credentials and corporate hierarchy. The p-values at different levels of significance confirm that the results are significant and highly unlikely to have occurred by chance alone.Based on Tau coefficient of the Kendall's test statistic, the magnitude of correlation between the said variables is found to be +0.33 with positive direction of correlation. This suggests that higher academic credentials can contribute about 33% to the total appraisal score given by an appraisal committee to a prospective candidate for direct placement or advancement to a leadership position in corporate hierarchy.