Ep. 103: When managers try to keep their best workers from moving into other departments

Most firms rely on managers to spot talented workers and to encourage them to move into bigger roles within the company. But managers are judged on how their own teams perform, giving them an incentive to hold on to their best people. In a paper in the American Economic Review, economist Ingrid Haegele provides the first empirical evidence that talent hoarding is prevalent and costly. Drawing on personnel records and surveys from a large European manufacturer with more than 200,000 employees, she finds that 75 percent of managers acknowledge hoarding. She says that the workers held back are disproportionately high-performing, with the effect falling hardest on women. Haegele recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how she measured talent hoarding, what it costs workers, and what firms might do about it.