IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/2531.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Talent Management: the Role of Bosses

Author

Listed:
  • Guido Friebel

    (University of Frankfurt)

  • Michael Raith

    (Rochester University)

Abstract

Managers (“bosses†) are central to the development and allocation of human capital in firms because they train employees and learn about their abilities. While a multi-divisional firm wants to allocate workers to wherever they are most productive, bosses who are rewarded for their units’ performance prefer to hold on to good employees, and the prospect of losing good people weakens the incentives to train them. We derive the optimal incentive contract for bosses that enables a firm to change from “silos†with only upward mobility to a “lattice†with cross-divisional mobility. Compared to silos, a lattice achieves a more efficient allocation of people to positions, but also entails agency costs that may exceed the benefits. We suggest empirical predictions about when silos or a lattice are optimal, and relate our model and its results to examples and evidence.

Suggested Citation

  • Guido Friebel & Michael Raith, 2025. "Talent Management: the Role of Bosses," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 2531, Rockwool Foundation Berlin (RF Berlin).
    • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:2531
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25031.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
    • M5 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:2531. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Moritz Lubczyk or Matthew Nibloe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.