Based upon what you read in the specified excerpt as below, see if you can propose a strategy for individuals who want to move up in a hierarchy in organizations where the samples of performance were SMALL rather than large as March describes toward the end of the excerpt (and the other assumptions he mentions apply). The idea here is to see if you can develop your own theory of how risk taking would affect promotion strategies using what March previously explained, but with small samples of performance. March describes the idea in general at the end of the section you read, but I want you to see if you can develop a strategy for an ambitious person to follow in such a setting and work out what the overall consequences would be for those who follow such a strategy. Be sure to include a scenario where there are a lot of competitors. The number of competitors makes a difference to how effective certain strategies may be considering the other conditions that may exist in the organization. Pls write 2-3 pages of your strategy.

SELECTION ON INDIVIDUAL TRAITS Insofar as risk-taking propensity is an individual trait, the main way in which organizational risk taking can be affected is by affecting the entrance, exit, and promotion of individuals with particular risktaking propensities. Who Enters? Who Leaves? Entry into and exit from an organization are commonly seen as voluntary matchmaking and match-breaking, acts of deliberate consequential choice. In such a vision, a match is established or continued if (and only if) it is acceptable to both the individual and the organization. Thus, in effect, the match between an individual and an organization continues as long as neither has a better alternative. This hyper-simple rational model of entries and exits is, of course, subject to a variety of qualifications of the sort considered in this book. But as long as it is taken as a very loose frame, it may serve to highlight a few features of the process by which individuals and organizations select each other. In particular, it is possible to ask whether entry or exit processes are likely to be affected by risk-taking propensity. One possibility is that an organization systematically monitors risk-taking propensity and explicitly includes that consideration in its decisions to hire or retain an individual. If risk-taking propensity is observable, the only question is whether one would expect an organization to prefer risk seekers or risk avoiders. The most common speculation is that organizations, particularly those using formal hiring and firing procedures, tend to prefer risk avoiders to risk seekers. The argument is straightforward: Since big employment mistakes are more visible, more attributable, and more connected to the reward system than big employment triumphs, rational employment agents prefer reliable employees to high-risk ones. The argument is plausible, but very little evidence exists for gauging the extent to which it is true. A second possibility is that organizations do not (or cannot) monitor risk-taking propensity but monitor other things that are, perhaps unknowingly, correlated with risk-taking propensity. For example, suppose employers seek competence. As they assess competence and secure it, they favor individuals who are able to gain and exhibit competence. Since an important element of competence is reliability -being able to accomplish something within relatively small tolerances for error-competence itself selects individuals by traits of risk-avoidance. Thus, unwittingly, an organization in pursuit of ordinary competence disproportionately selects risk avoiders. Who Moves Up? If risk taking is considered to be a trait that varies from individual to individual, we need to ask not only which individuals enter or exit an organization but also which individuals move toward the top in a hierarchy. As before, it can be imagined that an organization has some preference for risk-seeking or riskavoiding managers, monitors the behavior of candidates for promotion, and favors those who have the right traits. Also as before, the most common prediction is that (for reasons similar to those given above) an organization will tend to favor risk-avoiding managers for promotion. As a result, it is predicted that the average risk-taking propensity of higher-level managers will be less than that of lower-level managers. Surprisingly enough, the small amount of information available to test the prediction indicates that the prediction is wrong. The average risk-taking propensity of higher-level managers appears to be somewhat higher than that of lower-level managers. One possibility is, of course, that organizations monitor risk-taking propensity and differentially promote managers who are prone to take risks. Alternatively, however, it is possible that risk-prone managers are promoted not because the organization consciously seeks riskseeking executives but because it promotes those who do particularly well. To explore how this might come to pass, consider the following simple model: Assume that there is a hierarchy within the organization, that there is competition for promotion, and that promotion is based on comparative reputation. Reputation is accumulated over a series of performances on the job. Each single performance on a job is a draw from a distribution having a mean equal to the individual's ability level and a variance equal to the individual's risk-taking propensity. Individuals accumulate reputations over a series of performances. Their reputations are averages of their realized performances. Whenever a vacancy occurs in the organization, the person with the highest reputation on the next lower level is promoted. Let us assume that individual risk-taking propensity is a trait (individuals do not consciously choose to take risks, they are simply either risky people or cautious people), and that abilities and risktaking propensities are independent. Then, as the size of the performance samples becomes very large, the reputations of individuals approach their true abilities. The assignment of individuals to levels is determined entirely by the relative abilities of employees. Average ability increases as you move up the hierarchy, and average risk preference is approximately equal at every level in the organization. However, in real organizations performance samples are typically rather small. For very small performance samples (with moderate variability in both ability and risk-taking propensity), reputation no longer depends exclusively on ability but is a joint consequence of ability and risk-taking propensity. If the hierarchy is steep (that is, only a few people are promoted from one level to another), the assignment of individuals to levels is heavily dependent on risk preference. Average ability increases very little as you move up the hierarchy, while average risk preference increases substantially. Thus, a procedure that appears to promote people on the basis of their abilities actually moves them ahead on the basis of the amount of risk they take