Why Talent Reviews Need to Separate Demonstrated Capability From Access to the Work That Creates Evidence of Readiness
A recent discussion on succession planning raised a deceptively simple question: when an organisation assesses whether somebody is ready for a larger role, how much of the evidence reflects the individual’s capability, and how much reflects the opportunities the organisation previously gave that individual to demonstrate it?
Consider two employees who may both possess the potential to operate at a higher level. One is repeatedly given difficult projects, temporary leadership responsibilities, cross-functional initiatives, senior stakeholder exposure and consequential decisions through which broader capability can be developed and observed. The other becomes increasingly indispensable in the current role. Their expertise, relationships or operational reliability make them difficult to release, so they continue delivering strongly within the same organisational boundaries.
Over time, their succession records begin to diverge. The first employee accumulates evidence of operating at greater scale, influencing across functions, managing unfamiliar problems and exercising judgement under more demanding conditions. The second may continue to outperform in the current role while accumulating comparatively little direct evidence of performance at the next level.
When a succession review takes place, the first record can appear stronger. That may be entirely appropriate. Organisations should not promote people simply because someone believes that they might perform well in a larger role. Evidence matters. Yet the evidence itself has a history. Someone had to receive the assignment. Someone had to be trusted with the decision. Someone had to be released from existing responsibilities. Someone had to become visible to leaders capable of observing the work. Someone also had to accept the operational risk of allowing the employee to learn in a more consequential environment.
The resulting governance question is therefore more difficult than simply asking whether the talent process is evidence-based. The question is whether the organisation understands how that evidence was produced.
A succession process may believe that it is measuring readiness while partly measuring differential access to the work through which readiness becomes observable. That does not invalidate the succession judgement. It does mean that the provenance of the evidence matters.
The central proposition of this edition is therefore straightforward: a succession system should record not only what a candidate has demonstrated, but also whether the organisation gave that candidate a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate the capability being assessed.
Research and Validation Approach
This edition uses a focused narrative-review approach rather than presenting itself as a systematic review or meta-analysis. The purpose is to examine a practical succession-governance question through several related evidence streams while keeping the boundary between published research and RewardEdge practitioner interpretation explicit.
The research draws on work examining developmental assignments, stretch assignments, internal labour markets, talent hoarding, internal mobility and assessments of employee potential. These literatures address different parts of the overall problem. Research on developmental work helps establish whether assignments can contribute to managerial capability development. Research on stretch assignments examines the career implications of access to particular forms of work. Internal-mobility research helps explain how managers can influence movement and opportunity inside organisations. Talent-hoarding research examines circumstances in which managers may have reasons to retain valuable employees. Finally, research on potential assessment shows why formal talent labels should not automatically be treated as objective measures of future-role performance.
These bodies of evidence do not establish that succession systems systematically misclassify employees because of unequal opportunity. They do not prove that every employee who receives a stretch assignment becomes more capable, nor that every employee who lacks next-level evidence was unfairly denied the opportunity to build it. The evidence is more bounded than that.
What it does support is the underlying organisational logic that developmental work can matter, access to such work can vary, managers can influence internal mobility, and potential assessments remain difficult judgements rather than direct measurements of future performance.
The concept developed later in this edition, the RewardEdge Readiness Evidence Access Review, is therefore practitioner synthesis. It has not been validated as an academic, regulatory or legal diagnostic instrument. Its purpose is narrower: to help organisations examine whether their succession evidence is being interpreted without sufficient attention to the opportunity history that helped produce it.
Readiness Is Not Built Only in Classrooms
Leadership development is often discussed through formal programmes, coaching, competency frameworks, mentoring and development plans. These interventions can be valuable, but some managerial capability develops only when individuals have to exercise judgement in real organisational conditions.
McCauley, Eastman and Ohlott’s work on stretch assignments provided an important foundation for this argument. Their framework connected management development with challenging job experiences and examined how developmental assignments could be incorporated more deliberately into management-selection and succession processes. The significance of the work is not that every difficult assignment automatically creates stronger leaders. Rather, it shows why organisations should treat the work people perform as part of the leadership-development architecture rather than seeing development as something that occurs separately from work. [1]
Dragoni, Tesluk, Russell and Oh later tested related relationships using multisource data on early-career managers. They found that the developmental quality of managerial assignments was positively associated with end-state managerial competencies beyond the association explained by tenure. Their research also found that learning orientation and access to developmental opportunities interacted in important ways: managers with stronger learning orientations who had access to growth assignments were more likely to experience developmental work and achieve higher competence from those experiences. [2]
For succession planning, the implication is significant but should remain carefully bounded. The evidence does not justify assuming that employees without stretch assignments possess capability that is merely hidden. Nor does it mean that every stretch assignment should count as proof of readiness. It supports a more disciplined distinction.
The work people receive can affect both what they have an opportunity to develop and what the organisation subsequently has an opportunity to observe.
If a future role requires somebody to operate under greater ambiguity, influence across organisational boundaries, manage larger systems or make more consequential decisions, some of the strongest evidence may come from real work in which those capabilities were required. Training can prepare the individual. Assessment exercises can simulate some of the conditions. Interviews can explore previous judgement. Yet certain forms of evidence become substantially stronger when the responsibility has been real.
This means that succession planning has two related responsibilities. It must assess evidence rigorously, and it must understand whether credible opportunities existed for that evidence to be generated.
Stretch Work Can Be Both Development and Evidence
A stretch assignment can serve two organisational purposes at the same time. It can help an employee develop capability, and it can make previously untested capability more visible.
This second function is particularly important for succession systems because promotion and succession judgements depend heavily on observable evidence. A challenging assignment can reveal how someone deals with unfamiliar stakeholders, incomplete information, difficult trade-offs, increased scale or higher levels of organisational consequence. It can also expose the individual to a wider network of senior observers whose later views may influence career decisions.
Gilmartin and colleagues studied early-career assignments among 625 employed engineering graduates and examined how different types of work could affect career advancement and inequality. Their work treats stretch assignments as potentially career-advancing experiences and suggests that some forms of unfamiliar, high-development work can produce different patterns of access and career return across demographic groups. The study was conducted among early-career engineers in the United States, so it should not be directly generalised to executive succession. [3]
Its relevance to the present argument is narrower and more useful. Career-advancing work is not distributed by an abstract market. Organisations, managers and operating circumstances influence who receives it.
That allocation does not need to be deliberately unfair for the cumulative consequences to matter. Managers may choose individuals whose reliability is already proven. A project may require somebody who can start immediately. A team may be unable to release its strongest specialist. A senior sponsor may know one candidate better than another. One business unit may simply generate more complex developmental work than another.
Each decision can be individually reasonable while the resulting talent records become structurally different.
A mature succession system therefore needs to distinguish the evidence eventually observed from the opportunity history that helped produce the evidence.
That distinction does not require organisations to distribute every stretch opportunity equally. It requires them to understand the logic by which developmentally valuable opportunities are distributed and the consequences of those decisions for later assessments of readiness.
The High Performer Who Cannot Be Released
The problem becomes more difficult when the employee being considered for future progression is exceptionally valuable in the current role.
Organisations often encourage managers to develop talent for the wider enterprise while simultaneously holding those managers accountable for immediate customer outcomes, operational targets, project delivery, service levels and financial results. Releasing a high performer can therefore create a visible local cost even where the longer-term enterprise benefit may be substantial.
This tension is supported by recent empirical evidence. Ingrid Haegele’s 2026 American Economic Review study examined talent hoarding using personnel records and survey evidence from a large organisation. In that setting, three-quarters of managers reported engaging in talent-hoarding behaviour, with hoarding more frequent where incentives to retain employees were stronger. Quasi-random exposure to hoarding reduced employees’ internal job applications, inhibiting career progression and affecting talent allocation inside the organisation. [4]
The scope of the finding matters. Three-quarters is not a universal estimate of managers across organisations. It describes the organisational population studied. The mechanism, however, is directly relevant to succession governance: managers responsible for today’s team performance can have reasons to retain valuable employees even where mobility may benefit the wider enterprise.
Kraichy and Walsh examined another part of the same organisational tension. Their study of 116 managers found that psychological ownership of talented employees was associated with persuasion tactics used to hinder internal mobility. The relationship was stronger where managers experienced higher role overload and lower levels of social support. [5]
This evidence suggests that restricted mobility should not always be interpreted as simple managerial selfishness. The environment surrounding the manager can matter. A manager who lacks replacement capacity, faces high workload pressure or depends disproportionately on one specialist may experience the release of that employee as an operational risk.
From a RewardEdge perspective, this creates an important succession paradox. As an employee becomes increasingly valuable in the current role, the local cost of releasing that employee into developmental work can also increase. The organisation may therefore become more dependent on the individual precisely when broader exposure would be most important for their future development.
Later, the succession process may ask why the employee has not accumulated sufficient breadth.
When that happens, an operating-model constraint risks being recorded as though it were entirely a candidate characteristic.
The appropriate conclusion is not that the employee should automatically receive a higher readiness rating. The more disciplined response is to ask whether the missing evidence reflects insufficient capability, insufficient exposure, or some combination of both.
Managers Are Not Only Evaluators of Talent
Managers are often treated as observers inside talent systems. In practice, they can also influence the environments through which talent becomes visible.
Keller and Dlugos analysed 96,712 internal applications to 9,896 jobs over a five-year period in a large organisation and supplemented the quantitative work with 30 manager interviews across four organisations. They found that managers whose subordinates had previously been promoted attracted more, higher-quality and more functionally diverse applicants to later vacancies. The authors interpret previous subordinate promotions as signals that the manager may be willing to support employees’ advancement. [6]
The study does not establish that managers who produce fewer promotions are restricting careers. Nor does it directly measure succession readiness. Its relevance is that internal talent markets are shaped partly by managerial behaviour and reputation.
Managers can create movement, development and exposure. They can also make mobility more difficult.
This matters because movement often changes the type of evidence available to a succession committee. Employees entering different teams or assignments encounter new stakeholders, unfamiliar problems, broader responsibilities and different observers. These experiences can generate evidence that would never have emerged from continued performance inside the same operational environment.
Succession governance should therefore look beneath the final talent labels.
A nine-box grid, succession slate or readiness classification is the visible output of a much longer organisational process. Before an employee appears on the page, the organisation has already made many decisions about assignments, mobility, sponsorship, exposure, authority and release.
Those upstream decisions deserve scrutiny because they partly determine what the downstream talent process will later be able to observe.
Why Formal Potential Ratings Do Not Automatically Solve the Problem
Modern succession systems often attempt to address the limitations of historical performance by distinguishing performance from potential.
That distinction is important. Current performance and future-role capability are not the same thing.
Yet introducing an explicit potential rating does not automatically convert an uncertain judgement into an objective measurement.
Grabner, Künneke and Moers examined an international professional-services firm’s transition from a performance-only system to one that explicitly included potential assessment. Their dataset covered 2010 to 2015, with the new system introduced in 2013. Contrary to the intended purpose of the change, promoted employees’ subsequent performance was lower on average following implementation. The authors identified difficulties in assessing potential, including supervisors who did not differentiate sufficiently between employees, as an important reason the system failed to improve identification of suitable promotion candidates. [7]
The result comes from one organisational setting and should not be treated as evidence that explicit potential assessment generally worsens talent decisions. It does illustrate why the presence of a formal potential rating should not be confused with accurate prediction of next-role performance.
Benson, Li and Shue provide another important caution. Their 2026 study examined 29,809 management-track employees in a large retail chain. Women received lower subjective potential ratings despite receiving higher performance ratings, and the lower potential assessments did not accurately forecast later performance. Women subsequently outperformed male colleagues on average and at the margin of promotion. The authors identify strategic retention and stereotyping among the mechanisms contributing to the observed gap. [8]
This study examines gender differences in subjective potential assessment rather than developmental-opportunity access directly. Its contribution to the present discussion is therefore specific: potential remains a judgement.
That judgement becomes more defensible when organisations connect it to clearly defined next-role requirements, credible observations and an understanding of whether relevant opportunities existed through which those capabilities could have been demonstrated.
Succession systems should therefore resist a false choice between evidence and potential. Both need disciplined interpretation.
The Critical Distinction: Not Demonstrated, Not Capable and Not Sufficiently Exposed
One of the most useful changes an organisation can make to succession discussions is to separate three statements that are often treated as though they mean the same thing.
Not demonstrated means that the organisation does not currently possess sufficient evidence that the individual can perform the capability to the required standard.
Not capable means that credible available evidence supports a judgement that the individual is unlikely to perform the capability to the required standard.
Not sufficiently exposed means that the individual has not yet had a sufficiently relevant opportunity through which the capability could reasonably have been developed or observed.
These categories can overlap, but they should not automatically collapse into one another.
An employee who has never led a major cross-functional transformation cannot simply be presumed ready to lead one at significantly greater scale. The absence of relevant evidence is a legitimate concern. At the same time, the absence of such evidence does not necessarily prove the absence of underlying capability where the organisation has never provided comparable exposure.
The more useful succession question is therefore not whether the candidate has proved everything. It is whether leadership can identify what has been demonstrated, what remains uncertain, why the evidence is missing, and what would materially improve the quality of the judgement.
This approach preserves the readiness standard. It does not advocate promotion on potential alone.
What changes is the interpretation of uncertainty.
Rather than converting every missing experience into an implicit capability deficit, the organisation investigates the provenance of the missing evidence.
The RewardEdge Readiness Evidence Access Review
The following is a RewardEdge practitioner framework. It is not an academic, regulatory or legal standard and has not been validated as a diagnostic instrument.
Its purpose is to help succession committees distinguish evidence of capability from access to the conditions under which capability could reasonably be developed or observed. Each element should be applied in the same sequence so that the discussion moves from role requirements to evidence, opportunity, constraints and next action.
1. Target Capability
Core question: What exactly must the individual be capable of doing in the prospective role?
The organisation should define the material change in judgement, accountability, organisational scale, stakeholder complexity or decision authority rather than relying on broad descriptors such as “strategic”, “executive presence” or “ready for more”.
Governance implication: If the capability is not defined clearly, the organisation cannot determine whether the evidence being requested is actually relevant to the target role.
2. Required Evidence
Core question: What credible evidence would give the organisation reasonable confidence that the target capability exists?
The strength of evidence should be proportionate to the consequence and risk associated with the appointment. A materially larger role may legitimately require stronger evidence than a modest progression within the same level of complexity.
Governance implication: Defining evidence before discussing individual candidates reduces the risk of designing the definition of readiness around whichever experiences a preferred candidate happens already to possess.
3. Evidence-Producing Opportunity
Core question: Which assignments, projects, temporary responsibilities, rotations or decisions could reasonably develop or demonstrate the target capability?
Succession development becomes more actionable when the organisation identifies the actual work through which missing evidence could be generated.
Governance implication: A development plan that cannot identify an evidence-producing experience may remain aspirational rather than operational.
4. Access History
Core question: Which candidates have actually received relevant developmental opportunities?
The review should examine patterns across stretch assignments, high-visibility projects, cross-functional work, temporary leadership responsibilities, material decision authority and exposure to senior stakeholders.
Governance implication: The objective is not equal allocation of every assignment. It is visibility into whether opportunity patterns are explainable through defensible business and capability considerations.
5. Release Constraint
Core question: Where relevant opportunity was unavailable, what prevented access?
The answer may involve capability concerns, employee choice, timing, geography, lack of suitable assignments or operational dependence on the individual’s current contribution.
Governance implication: Different reasons for missing exposure have different implications. A candidate who declined an opportunity should not be treated identically to one whom the organisation repeatedly considered too important to release.
6. Assessment Separation
Core question: Can the review panel distinguish insufficient evidence from affirmative evidence of insufficient capability?
This is the point at which evidence provenance enters the actual succession judgement.
Governance implication: If every missing experience becomes a lower capability judgement, the system risks treating organisational opportunity allocation as though it were entirely an employee characteristic.
7. Next Evidence Decision
Core question: Where readiness remains genuinely uncertain, what additional experience or observation would materially reduce that uncertainty?
The succession review should conclude with an evidence plan rather than only a label.
Governance implication: A useful decision identifies what remains unknown, whether obtaining better evidence is realistic, who is responsible for creating the opportunity, and when the judgement will be revisited.
Taken together, the seven elements create a more disciplined progression:
Target capability → Required evidence → Evidence-producing opportunity → Access history → Release constraint → Assessment separation → Next evidence decision.
The purpose is not to make succession less selective. It is to make the basis of selectivity more transparent.
The Reward and Performance Consequence
The problem does not belong only to Talent Management. It can also be reinforced by performance and Reward architecture.
Haegele’s research is particularly relevant because it identifies tension between managers’ responsibility for current team performance and the incentives surrounding the retention of valuable employees. [4] From a RewardEdge perspective, this raises a broader organisational question: if the enterprise says talent mobility matters, does the management system make releasing talent unnecessarily costly for the manager who developed it?
A manager may experience the immediate consequences of losing a strong performer through reduced capacity, disrupted customer relationships, delayed delivery or greater workload for the remaining team. The organisational benefit, by contrast, may appear elsewhere and later when another part of the enterprise gains an experienced employee.
This creates an asymmetry between local cost and enterprise value.
It does not follow that every organisation should introduce a talent-export metric into managerial incentives. Nor should managers be rewarded simply for moving people. Poorly governed mobility can destabilise operations and promote people into environments for which they are not prepared.
The principle is more restrained. If leadership expects managers to build enterprise talent, the performance system should be examined for contradictions that make enterprise mobility locally irrational.
This may include questions about replacement capacity, succession below the departing employee, recognition for developing successors, expectations around internal movement and whether managers are penalised for temporary performance disruption caused by releasing strong talent.
Talent philosophy becomes credible when the operating model supports the behaviour the philosophy asks managers to demonstrate.
What the Evidence Supports, and What It Does Not
Taken together, the research supports a bounded but meaningful set of conclusions.
Developmental managerial assignments are associated with later managerial competencies. Career-advancing work can function as both developmental experience and evidence used in advancement decisions. Managers can influence internal mobility, while managerial incentives and working conditions can affect behaviours around retaining talented employees. Formal potential assessments remain difficult judgements and should not be assumed to forecast future-role performance accurately simply because they have become institutionalised.
The evidence does not establish that every employee who lacks promotion evidence was denied opportunity. It does not establish that every stretch assignment improves capability. It does not establish that managers who retain strong employees are necessarily acting against organisational interests. It does not demonstrate that every difference in developmental exposure represents unfairness, nor does it justify promoting employees where credible readiness evidence is genuinely absent.
The research also does not validate the RewardEdge Readiness Evidence Access Review as a scientific instrument.
The practitioner conclusion is therefore deliberately narrower.
When an organisation controls a substantial share of access to the work through which readiness evidence is created, it should be careful about treating missing evidence as proof of missing capability.
The appropriate response is not to assume capability.
It is to investigate the source of the uncertainty.
Five Leadership Actions
The following actions translate the evidence and practitioner framework into governance practice. Each action follows the same structure: the leadership question, the organisational rationale and the practical consequence.
1. Separate Readiness Evidence From Opportunity History
Leadership question: What has the candidate demonstrated, and what relevant opportunities has the candidate actually received?
Rationale: The quality of a succession judgement improves when decision-makers distinguish evidence from the conditions that allowed that evidence to be produced.
Practical consequence: Talent reviews should include enough opportunity history to explain whether missing evidence reflects lack of exposure, capability concerns or some combination of both.
2. Define the Evidence Before Reviewing the Candidate
Leadership question: What evidence would reasonably demonstrate readiness for this role if no individual candidate had yet been discussed?
Rationale: Defining readiness requirements before reviewing people reduces the risk of constructing the standard around familiar candidates or experiences.
Practical consequence: Critical roles should have clearly defined evidence expectations linked to actual differences in accountability, complexity, judgement and scale.
3. Review Who Receives Career-Advancing Work
Leadership question: Who repeatedly receives the assignments through which next-level capability can be developed and observed?
Rationale: Developmental opportunity does not need to be distributed identically, but persistent patterns should be understood rather than left invisible.
Practical consequence: Organisations should periodically review stretch assignments, temporary leadership, critical projects, transformation work, cross-functional responsibilities and high-value decision exposure.
4. Examine Whether Managers Can Afford to Release Strong People
Leadership question: What happens operationally when a manager successfully develops somebody who becomes ready to move?
Rationale: A talent philosophy that encourages mobility can conflict with operating conditions that make releasing capable employees highly costly.
Practical consequence: Leadership should consider replacement capacity, bench strength, succession underneath the employee and the performance implications borne by the sending manager.
5. End Uncertain Readiness Judgements With an Evidence Plan
Leadership question: What additional evidence would materially reduce the uncertainty surrounding this candidate?
Rationale: “Not ready” can become a static label when the organisation never defines what would change the judgement.
Practical consequence: Where readiness remains uncertain, the succession review should identify the relevant assignment, exposure or assessment, establish responsibility for making it available where appropriate, and define when the evidence will be reconsidered.
The RewardEdge Perspective
Succession planning does not become stronger by becoming less evidence-based. It becomes stronger by becoming more precise about where the evidence came from.
Past performance matters. Relevant experience matters. Manager observations matter. Assessment evidence matters. Potential judgements can matter. Developmental assignments matter.
Yet none of those inputs exists independently of the organisational environment surrounding the employee.
The organisation influences whether someone can leave a critical role. Managers influence access to assignments and mobility. Sponsors and senior leaders influence visibility. Business structures determine where developmental work exists. Performance systems can influence whether releasing strong employees feels organisationally valued or locally costly.
Succession committees then assess records partly created by these earlier decisions.
This is especially important for highly dependable employees.
An organisation should become curious when the same person repeatedly receives two messages: “You are too important for us to release” and, later, “You have not yet demonstrated enough breadth for the next role.”
Both statements can sometimes be legitimate. A business may genuinely face a temporary inability to release an employee, while the employee may genuinely lack sufficient evidence for a larger appointment.
The governance problem begins when the pattern persists without the organisation recognising the connection between the two.
At that point, the succession discussion should ask whether the employee is carrying a capability gap, whether the organisation is carrying an opportunity-access problem, or whether both are true.
That distinction matters because succession systems should not confuse the absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
The governing principle of this edition is therefore:
Readiness evidence is not only found. It is also partly produced by the opportunities the organisation makes available.
A defensible succession system should understand both sides of that equation.
Inviting Perspectives
This edition grew from recent discussions around succession, opportunity allocation, leadership readiness, performance architecture and the possibility that talent systems can reproduce constraints already present in the operating model. I would particularly value perspectives from five people whose recent contributions have touched different parts of this question.
Brad Wolfe![]()
Brad, your point that “not released due to business need” can eventually leave somebody with a thin evidence record sits at the centre of this edition. Should succession reviews explicitly record when missing readiness evidence results partly from operating constraints rather than candidate capability? And should repeated failure to release people for consequential assignments itself become a succession-risk signal?
Maha Alaoui![]()
Maha, our recent discussion explored how the unit of value changes as someone moves into more senior leadership. How should organisations test next-level judgement when a high performer continues to be rewarded primarily for expert execution in the current role? At what point does continuing to use someone for what they already do exceptionally well begin to limit the evidence needed for what they could do next?
Hassan Tirmizi![]()
Hassan, we recently discussed how talent systems can legitimise weaknesses in the architecture they are supposed to evaluate. When employees become highly successful at navigating a difficult operating model, how should succession reviews distinguish genuine next-level capability from behaviours the existing system happens to reward?
Andrew Nowak![]()
Andrew, your point that formal organisational redesign can leave the old system alive through performance and talent decisions is particularly relevant here. What governance would prevent a redesigned organisation from recreating the same opportunity bottlenecks through managers who still control access to consequential assignments, internal mobility and high-visibility work?
Sara Riedel![]()
Sara, our recent discussions around leadership and AI have repeatedly returned to demonstrated judgement rather than assumed capability. What evidence would you trust when deciding that a leader is ready for greater decision authority if the individual has not yet been given enough consequential decisions at the target level to demonstrate that judgement independently?
These perspectives lead to a broader leadership test:
Before calling somebody “not ready”, can the organisation show that the person had a reasonable opportunity to develop and demonstrate the capability being assessed?
Closing Question
Imagine your next succession review.
A strong performer is discussed for a critical future role, but the panel agrees that important evidence of readiness is missing.
Before reducing the candidate’s readiness assessment, could the organisation answer four questions with confidence?
What evidence is actually missing?
What assignment or exposure could reasonably have produced that evidence?
Was the employee given a reasonable opportunity to obtain that exposure?
If not, was the constraint primarily the candidate’s capability, the organisation’s ability to release and test the candidate, or a combination of both?
The succession process may still need to make a decision even when those questions cannot be answered perfectly.
But it should be careful about claiming that the resulting judgement reflects capability alone.
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Sources and Further Reading
1. McCauley, C. D., Eastman, L. J. & Ohlott, P. J. (1995). Linking Management Selection and Development Through Stretch Assignments. Human Resource Management, 34(1), 93–115. DOI: 10.1002/hrm.3930340107.
2. Dragoni, L., Tesluk, P. E., Russell, J. E. A. & Oh, I-S. (2009). Understanding Managerial Development: Integrating Developmental Assignments, Learning Orientation, and Access to Developmental Opportunities in Predicting Managerial Competencies. Academy of Management Journal, 52(4), 731–743. DOI: 10.5465/AMJ.2009.43669936.
3. Gilmartin, S. K., Brunhaver, S. R., Jordan-Bloch, S., Gall Rosa, G., Simard, C. & Sheppard, S. D. (2024). Early-Career Assignments and Workforce Inequality in Engineering. Engineering Studies, 16(1), 8–32. DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2023.2272807.
4. Haegele, I. (2026). Talent Hoarding in Organizations. American Economic Review, 116(8), 3110–3151. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20220264.
5. Kraichy, D. & Walsh, M. M. (2022). Hindering Talented Employees’ Internal Mobility: Managers’ Territorial Response to Stress. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 37(1), 76–89. DOI: 10.1108/JMP-02-2021-0054.
6. Keller, J. R. & Dlugos, K. (2023). Advance ’Em to Attract ’Em: How Promotions Influence Applications in Internal Talent Markets. Academy of Management Journal, 66(6), 1831–1859. DOI: 10.5465/amj.2021.1174.
7. Grabner, I., Künneke, J. & Moers, F. (2025). Promotion Decisions and the Adoption of Explicit Potential Assessment. Management Science, 71(11), 9233–9255. DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.02199.
8. Benson, A., Li, D. & Shue, K. (2026). “Potential” and the Gender Promotion Gap. American Economic Review, 116(2), 375–417. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20220831
