Deciding who gets the training slot isn’t a skills call. It’s a fairness test you didn’t know you were giving.

You have one training seat open this quarter — one conference slot, one certification budget, one seat in the leadership cohort — and two names on the short list. One person is barely keeping up. The other is the one you quietly build the schedule around. You already know who needs the help more. What you don't know, and this is the part that changes the outcome, is which one your team already expects to get it.

That is the actual subject of a study published September 20 in the Journal of Accounting Research: "When Is It Fairer to Allocate Resources for Training to Lower Performing Versus Higher Performing Employees?" by Eric W. Chan (McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin), Mackenzie K. Feinberg (Goizueta Business School, Emory University) and Martin Wiernsperger (Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University). It is a controlled lab experiment, not a survey of real workplaces and not a study of your employees — that distinction matters, and I'll come back to it.

The researchers put 186 people into three-person groups: one manager, two employees. Employees took a quiz on idioms, weighted mostly toward English or, for a harder version, mostly toward German. In one condition, employees chose which quiz to take — built to mimic a workplace where people have real say over their own tasks. In the other, the quiz was assigned at random — built to mimic a more rigid, egalitarian setup. Pay ran on a "tournament" contract: the higher scorer on each quiz won a real prize, the other got nothing. After the first quiz, the manager picked one employee to receive help ahead of round two. Then the researchers measured how the passed-over employee reacted.

The reaction depended on which environment they were in. Under the assigned, egalitarian setup, lower performers had come to expect the training as their due — and reacted badly when it went to the top performer instead. Under the choice-driven, meritocratic setup, it flipped: the top performer was the one who took it personally when passed over. The paper's own abstract adds a qualifier worth keeping: additional experiments, it says, found these reactions most pronounced under tournament incentives — the pay structure described above — and the authors write that they may disappear under individual, performance-based pay — a variant the coverage I read doesn't describe in method detail, so I can't tell you more about how that version ran.

"It's a very challenging question from a manager's perspective. They might not fully consider fairness, and focus just on productivity. And this can have, depending on the norms that prevail in the work environment, pretty negative implications for further productivity." Martin Wiernsperger, as quoted in Cornell Chronicle

I read the Cornell Chronicle writeup and the paper's own abstract via Crossref, which carries the full abstract; the journal itself sat behind a paywall I couldn't get past, so the method details above come from the university's account of the experiment, not the full paper text.

Here is why this lands differently for you than for a manager three layers down in a large company. In a company like yours, there usually isn't an HR function standing between your decision and the person it lands on. You pick who goes to the training, and everyone watches you do it. And the norm the paper says determines the reaction — whether people are used to choosing their own work or having it assigned to them — isn't something you're voting on. It's already been set, silently, by how you've been running the place for the last two years. You didn't choose a fairness rule. You built one by default.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: the fix here isn't finding the objectively fairer person to send. It's figuring out, before you announce anything, which rule your team is currently living under — because the same decision reads as generous in one shop and as a slap in another, and the study gives no evidence that either group is wrong to feel what it feels. That's my read, not the authors'; they measured the reaction, not whether it was reasonable.

This week, before you fill the next seat: ask yourself honestly whether your people currently pick their own assignments or take what they're handed. If it's the latter, expect your strugglers to feel entitled to the help — and say out loud why the high performer isn't getting it this time. If it's the former, expect the opposite, and be ready to explain the investment in the person still catching up. Either way, the explanation is the part you can't skip. Neither the abstract nor the Chronicle write-up mentions testing silence, and nothing in either suggests silence goes over well in either regime.

If how your own people read fairness and where you're primed to misjudge a call like this is a live question for you, the Leadership Profile is built for exactly that gap.