Uniquely Singaporean: promotions

A Singaporean promotion is one in which your job title changes, you have tons of new duties and responsibilities, and no additional pay. How does this happen?

Well, take performance appraisals at the university. These are directly tied to performance bonuses, which makes sense. And the number crunchers assume that if you graph people’s performance appraisals they should fit a bell curve and you’ll get a normal distribution of good, bad and middling performances. In fact, they say, a bell curve PROVES that you are avoiding nepotism and favoritism, and furthering the uniquely Singaporean dream of meritocracy (and incidentally cutting down on corruption).

This makes sense until you realize that if recruiters are hiring only the best-qualified candidates you should only have high performers. But the university bean counters don’t think that way, and they require, in the top-down manner typical of Singapore management, that departments submit bell curves with all their staff neatly fitted into them.

So university departments are stuck with the job of deciding who has done worse in their jobs and whose pay, free of performance bonuses will remain static. And logically, those who were recently promoted or hired are the ones newest to the job, therefore cannot possibly excel at it, therefore go on the low end of the bell curve, and therefore get no performance bonus. Problem solved, even if people were hired or promoted because it was felt that they would do the job well.

Voila! By using math and logic, Singapore creates a system in which promotion does not pay.

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