This feels to me like a stretch. Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf studied data from the Argentinian army and compared it with historical accounts of dictatorships and coups, tracing differences between henchmen, coup plotters, and other members of the officer corps. These are situations where your physical survival often depends on what you do.

That's very different from company environments.

The Peter Principle is also unfortunately an overly simplistic model. Yes, some people can get promoted to a level where they technically can't cope anymore, but ability is rarely the measure by which people advance (except at the lowest grades where your political power is almost nil).