At a moment when employers are sinking billions of dollars into AI adoption, workforce development has become less of a priority. Training budgets have contracted, forcing companies to make tough choices about which employees deserve the additional support that they’re still willing to offer.
With finite resources for training and upskilling their employees, who should they invest in: low performers or their best and brightest?
That’s the question behind new research out of Cornell University, which found that decisions regarding employee selection for additional training can prove fraught, depending on the culture of a workplace. On the whole, workers tend to be grateful when they are chosen for training sessions. But at a company that is more egalitarian—where employees have less control over their job tasks and are treated more equally—low performers feel more entitled to extra training and almost take it for granted. In a setting that is more meritocratic—where workers have more autonomy and agency and can choose their own projects—high-performing employees usually react more poorly if they are overlooked for training opportunities.
When their workplace is relatively egalitarian, even top employees seem to perceive performance differences as more arbitrary, making them less resentful if their colleagues receive additional training. “People might say, well, everyone should get the chance to improve because performance differences might simply reflect bad luck,” says Martin Wiernsperger, an accounting professor at Cornell’s business school and a coauthor of the study.
In a meritocratic workplace, however, high performers are more likely to feel like they should be rewarded for their efforts. Wiernsperger cites the example of a consulting firm that allows its employees to choose their projects, rather than being automatically assigned to one regardless of their expertise. “We all had the same chance to start at the same level, essentially, because we could all choose what we think we’re good at,” he says. “So if I perform better, then I’ve invested more effort, and I essentially deserve it.”
Wiernsperger and his team of researchers had noticed that people complained about being denied opportunities for professional development. To test their theories, the team designed an experiment that would replicate how these dynamics might play out in a professional environment, recruiting college and graduate students to take a quiz testing their knowledge of idioms that were mostly in either English or German.
To simulate an egalitarian setting, students were randomly assigned to one of the two quizzes, whether or not they spoke German; in the meritocratic setting, they could choose to take the quiz that was mostly in English or the one mostly in German. From there, the people who played managers would decide whether or not to offer additional training to people who performed well on the quiz or to those who performed poorly.
The outcome of the study largely confirmed Wiernsperger’s suspicions—that high performers would take issue with being cut out of professional development opportunities in a more competitive environment. But one thing surprised him: Regardless of the workplace culture, managers were far more likely to assign training to lower performers, with two-thirds of them doing so in the experiment, in the hopes of improving their productivity and work output.
“At least in our setting, managers thought training should go to the lower performers—and they didn’t fully think through the fairness implications this might have for the higher performers,” Wiernsperger says.
As this study suggests, companies could risk alienating high performers if they automatically grant training opportunities to lower performers, particularly when workers are hungry for more upskilling and professional development.
With AI steadily reshaping the workforce and recurring layoffs at major companies, employees may be seeking a competitive advantage—and they’ve likely noticed that employers are demanding more from them without investing as much in their success. In a “low-hire, low-fire” market, some workers might be looking for ways to advance within their current workplace, or set themselves up for success when companies inevitably start hiring again.
“This reaction to the training allocation is most salient when employees feel they are in a competitive setting,” Wiernsperger says. “I guess that also speaks to the labor market that we are in. . . . Employees compete for a limited number of promotions, compete for pay raises, and even compete to stay in the company—since lower performers might be kicked out.”