Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation. An interesting vacancy opens up in the company. You have relevant experience, good results, and you are ready to give it a try. Your manager acknowledges your achievements, but asks you to postpone the move: right now, there is no one to replace you.
A few months go by. A replacement still hasn’t been found, the new opportunity has already closed, and you continue doing the work for which you are so valued.
Strong results can make a person indispensable in their current position. And for a manager who depends on these results, it can be beneficial to keep everything as it is.
Economist Ingrid Haegele studied this conflict in the paper Talent Hoarding in Organizations, published in the American Economic Review in 2026. She compared personnel data and surveys from a large industrial company. Talent hoarding—withholding talent within a team—was acknowledged in their own behavior by three-quarters of the surveyed managers. This is a metric of a single company, not the share of managers in general.
The logic of the conflict is clear. If a manager is evaluated by their team's results, the departure of a strong employee can cause immediate problems for them: a vacancy, searching for a replacement, and training a new person. The gain for another department will be noticeable to the company as a whole, but it is the current manager who has to deal with the vacated area.
In such a situation, a subordinate’s career growth also becomes an operational loss for the manager.
In the detailed working version of the study, Haegele analyzes managerial rotations. When a manager was preparing to move to another position themselves, internal applications from their employees became more frequent. The author links this dynamic to a weaker incentive to hoard people in the former team. This interpretation depends on assumptions about the causes and consequences of rotations.
For an employee, there is a useful question here: what exactly stands in the way of the next step—the requirements of the new role, or the current team’s dependence on their work?
Good performance in a current role does not by itself guarantee readiness for another one. A new role may require different skills. But these requirements can be articulated, discussed, and tested. It is harder to deal with a situation where proven results are accompanied by vague waiting: the move will become possible when a replacement finally appears.
For HR, this is a reason to look at how internal mobility is organized in the company. Can an employee apply for a vacancy before clearing it with their manager? Who evaluates their readiness? Is there a clear timeline for the handover of responsibilities? What happens if the sending department cannot find a replacement for a long time?
The answers will help separate the qualification check from the replacement problem.
As a local pilot, one could agree on an internal application procedure, a handover timeline, and support for the manager who is letting the employee go. Then observe whether transfer timelines, the number of applications, and the performance of the sending team change. The benefits of such a process are worth verifying against one's own data: the study did not evaluate this specific set of measures.
For an employee, specificity is also helpful in career development discussions. What requirements of the next role have not yet been met? How can readiness be demonstrated? If the obstacle is finding a replacement, who is responsible for searching for one, and when will the parties return to the decision?
The study examined one company in Germany. For employers in Uzbekistan, this is a reason to check their own procedures; the prevalence of such behavior and the effect of potential changes will need to be determined on their own data.
When a company tells an employee "we need you too much," the next question is what growth path it is prepared to offer them.
Source: Haegele, I. (2026). Talent Hoarding in Organizations. American Economic Review, 116(8), 3110–3151. DOI (https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20220264).