Training the Wrong People: Why Firms Risk Alienating Top Talent

Two-thirds of managers funnel training toward their weakest employees—and Cornell University research suggests that habit may quietly alienate the strongest people on the payroll.

The finding comes from a new study by Martin Wiernsperger, an accounting professor at Cornell's business school, and his co-authors, published in a paper examining how workers react to decisions about who gets professional development. The stakes are rising: employers are sinking billions of dollars into AI adoption while workforce development has slipped as a budget priority. Training budgets have contracted, and companies now face a blunt question—when you can only fund upskilling for some, do you pick the strugglers or the stars?

The answer, the Cornell team found, depends heavily on workplace culture. In an experiment designed to replicate professional dynamics, workers generally reacted gratefully when chosen for training. But culture changed everything. At egalitarian companies—where employees have less control over their tasks and are treated more equally—low performers felt entitled to extra training and almost took it for granted. In meritocratic settings—where workers choose their own projects and have more autonomy—high performers reacted sharply when overlooked.

Wiernsperger explains the logic. In egalitarian workplaces, even top employees perceive performance differences as arbitrary, which softens resentment. "People might say, well, everyone should get the chance to improve because performance differences might simply reflect bad luck," he says.

Meritocratic workplaces flip that calculation. Wiernsperger points to a consulting firm where employees pick their own projects rather than receiving assignments regardless of 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."

How the experiment worked

The researchers began with an observation: people complained about being denied professional development opportunities. To test the dynamics, they recruited college and graduate students for a quiz on idioms, mostly in English or German. In the egalitarian condition, students were randomly assigned to a quiz whether or not they spoke German. In the meritocratic condition, they chose. Participants playing managers then decided whether to offer additional training to strong performers or weak ones.

The results largely confirmed Wiernsperger's hypothesis that high performers would take issue with exclusion in competitive environments. The surprise came from the manager side: regardless of culture, managers overwhelmingly directed training to lower performers—two-thirds of them did—hoping to lift their productivity and 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.

The labor market backdrop

The timing matters. AI is steadily reshaping the workforce, layoffs keep recurring at major companies, and employers are demanding more from workers while investing less in their success, the study's authors note. In a low-hire, low-fire market, employees are hunting for any competitive edge—either to advance internally or to position themselves for when hiring resumes.

For companies, the study carries a concrete warning: automatically granting training to low performers risks demotivating the high performers who drive results, especially in autonomous, project-choosing cultures where effort and reward feel tightly linked. Wiernsperger frames the competitive pressure his experiment captured as a mirror of today's labor market.

"This reaction to the training allocation is most salient when employees feel they are in a competitive setting," he 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."

As training budgets stay tight and AI reshuffles skill requirements, companies that treat development as a reward for effort rather than a remedial tool may have an easier time keeping their best people.