The Marginal Revolution blog linked to a really interesting study on talent hoarding a practice in which managers prevent productive workers from seeking promotions. The study author, Ingrid Haegele, found that when the manager is promoted, subordinates have the best opportunity to gain promotions themselves.

My findings indicate that talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent by reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers….Manager rotations increase worker applications for major promotions by 123%, indicating that talent hoarding deters a large group of workers from applying for promotions.

[…]

I find that talent hoarding has disparate impacts by gender. Talent hoarding deters a larger share of female applicants from applying for major promotions compared to men. Female marginal applicants are twice as likely to land a major promotion than males, implying that talent hoarding
is more consequential for women’s career progression. Conditional on landing a promotion, women are almost three times as likely as their male counterparts to perform well in their new positions, suggesting that the firm may be failing to realize potential productivity gains by not enabling
talented women to progress to higher-level positions. Female marginal applicants are much more qualified than males in terms of their educational qualifications and past performance, indicating that talent hoarding affects women at a higher part of the quality distribution compared to men.

Interestingly, Haegele found that talent hoarding was generally gender neutral. Male and female managers were equally likely to hoard talent and these managers suppressed the advancement opportunities of both male and female subordinates generally equally. She says credits the gender difference to:

“….the survey finds that women in the firm place more value on preserving a good relationship with their manager and rely more on managers’ career guidance when making application decisions.”

As a result, they are less likely to apply for promotions.

A couple things to note: First, this is only a study of the impact of talent hoarding. There are plenty of other factors which contribute to workplace inequities for everyone. The author had to control for a lot of factors in her study, among them being that managers have a lot of subtle tools that their disposal to reinforce talent hoarding that are difficult to detect.

The other thing to note is that she conducted her survey on a large multi-national manufacturing corporation with most of its employees in Germany. While she does cite other studies illustrating how talent hoarding occurs in the U.S. and other countries, her findings may not be entirely applicable to small non-profits in the U.S.

Talent hoarding in staff of 12 is certain to have entirely different dynamics, especially with the limited opportunities for internal promotions.

But if anything, during this Great Resignation period where people are looking for better opportunities for themselves, being aware that your manager has a disincentive to praise your talents, both within the organization and to you personally is something to consider.