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Internal mobility—the movement of employees across different roles within an organization—is a core component of a firm’s talent strategy. However, organizations often face barriers to internal talent movement, including talent hoarding, where managers prevent or discourage employees from pursuing internal opportunities. As requests for research-based studies on the impact of talent hoarding on internal mobility increase, here are two notable examples:
- A study in the Academy of Management Journal by JR Keller (Cornell University) and Kathryn Dlugos (Pennsylvania State University) demonstrates that supporting direct reports’ career development attracts high-quality, functionally diverse internal applicants, while talent hoarding leads to recruitment challenges and higher turnover.
- Another study by Ingrid Hägele, Professor of Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, shows that when managers temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers’ applications for promotions increase by 123%.
Given this backdrop, one idea is for organizations to establish a “net exporter of talent” metric that captures the extent to which managers share talent (especially top talent) within their organizations. I will be writing more about this metric in a future article.
