Paying people to become the hub works. The ones who become hubs are also the ones more likely to leave.

You announce a bonus this quarter for whoever becomes the person everyone else goes to — the one who knows who to call, who connects the groups that never talk. Within a few months, the org chart's informal layer starts to look the way you paid for. The open question is what happens to the people who got there.

A paper published online on 22 October 2026 in Strategic Management Journal looks at that question. It is titled "Pay-for-prominence: The (un)intended consequences of monetary incentives on employees' networks and attrition," by Alessandro Iorio (Department of Management and Technology and ICRIOS, Bocconi University), Giuseppe Soda (Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University) and Brandy Aven (Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University). The paywall kept me from the full paper, so everything here comes from the published abstract and its managerial summary, which I read through Crossref's record of the paper.

The authors define pay-for-prominence as a system in which employees are monetarily incentivized to become knowledge hubs in the intrafirm network. Their method, per the abstract, is a field quasi-experiment in a multinational firm. That is real behavior inside a real organization, not a lab exercise and not a survey of attitudes. It is also not a randomized trial, and the abstract does not give the number of employees, the length of the study or how the comparison group was formed. I can't tell you those things, because I didn't reach the pages that hold them.

What the abstract does report: organizations can successfully incentivize employees' network prominence, but doing so may produce unintended consequences. The managerial summary is more specific. Rewards based on network metrics encouraged employees to broaden their connections, which enhanced knowledge flows within the firm. And "employees who become more socially prominent experience higher attrition than those who do not."

The authors' explanation is that those employees become preoccupied with networking. The abstract frames that as their argument ("we argue"), and I'd read it as a proposed mechanism rather than something the abstract shows was measured. They also describe a trade-off: enhanced connectivity in the short term against the risk of network fragmentation in the long term. Fragmentation is described as a risk. The abstract does not report it as an observed outcome.

Managers should weigh the benefits of increased connectivity against the risks of fragmentation when designing incentive programs aimed at fostering informal networks.

Managerial summary of the published abstract, as reproduced in Crossref's record

Here is why this lands differently for the person at the top than for anyone else in the building. You are the one who chooses the metric, funds the reward and sees the first result. The first result is good: the connections show up, the information moves. The departures arrive later, one at a time, and each one comes with its own explanation — a better offer, a family move, a difficult manager. Nobody in the building is positioned to line those exits up against the incentive you set months earlier. You are, and only if you decide in advance to look.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: this is an inference, mine and not the authors', and it rests on an abstract. The people who become hubs are, almost by definition, the people others rely on. If the study's preoccupation mechanism is right, the reward may be pulling attention toward the act of networking and away from the work. Even if it is wrong, the observed pattern is enough to treat your most connected people as a group to watch rather than a group you have already secured. Nothing in the abstract says what would reduce the attrition, so I won't claim a fix.

The study also has limits that I'd name, again as my own reading. It is one multinational firm, so I can't say how far the result travels to a different industry or a different pay structure. And the abstract tells you attrition was higher among those who became more prominent; it does not tell you how large the gap was or whether those who left were the firm's strongest performers.

One concrete thing to do this week. If you reward, or are about to reward, anything visible — referrals, mentoring hours, cross-team projects, response times — write down now, in one paragraph, who you expect to rise on that measure and what you would do if three of them resigned within a year. Put a date on the calendar six months out to compare the list of people who rose with the list of people who left. If a reward is already running, pull both lists today.

The question underneath is how much of your organization's connective tissue sits on a handful of people, and whether the way you pay them is quietly moving them toward the door. That is the kind of question the Leadership Profile is built to surface; you can start at /wiring-map.